GUARD WELL THE HOME. 



! -—♦- »■ 



The Mutual Provident Association 

OF BOSTON, MASS. 

Incorporated Under Massachusetts Laws. 

President^ 

Hon. THOMAS W. BICKNELL, Editor and Publisher. 

Vice -I 1 resilient* 5 

Rev. EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D., 
Hon. JOHN D. PniLBRICK, LL. D., 
D. B HAGAR, Ph.D., 
A. P. STONE, LL. D. 

Secretary, Treasurer, 

CHARLES F. KING. J. F. BLACKENTON. 

"Directors, 

Hon. THOS. W. BICKNELL, Journal of Education, etc. 
D. B. HAGAR, Ph.D., Principal Normal School, Salem, Mass. 
Rev. A. E. DUNNING, National Congregational S. S. Secretary. 
A. P. MARBLE, Ph.D., Supt. Schools, Worcester, Mass. 
LARKIN DUNTON, LL.D., Prin. Normal School, Boston, Mat-B. 
A. C. STOCKIN, N. E. Agt. for Harper & Bros., Watertown, Mass. 
WM. E. 8HKLDON, Editor Primary Teacher, Newton, Mass. 
CHARLES F. KING, Roxbury, Mass. 

M. W. HA ZEN, N. E. Agt. for D. Appleton & Co., Boston, Mass. 

J. F. BLACKINTON, A.M., Prin. Emerson School, E. Boston, Mass. 

Prext. of Advisory Board, 

Hon. JOHN W. DICKINSON, Sec'y Board of Education, Mass. 

Medical Director, 

G. LOWELL AUSTIN, M.D., Boston, Mass. 

SOME OF ITS ADVANTAGES. 

Lower Rate* of IVIortnlity. Fewer Assessments. 
Equitably Arranged AdmitNion Fees. 

Women Admitted on Equal Terms with IVfeu. 
No St leading" or " I'reniinui Reserves." 
CIns-.es cot Limited in ft umbers. 
Prompt Pavment of Benefits. 

Perfect Safety. Protection at Cost. 

It is Safer, Cheaper, and Better than 
ordinary I.ife Insurance. 



CO-OPERATION NEWLY A PPEIEB.— Life Insurance is, 
theoretically, one of the blessings of modern society, relieviug the anxi- 
eties of those having families dependent upon them, protecting the home, 
aiding the widow, feeding and educating the fatherless. Practically, it 
has been available only to the rich; in too many case* it has shamefully 
abused its sacred trusts, and cruelly deceived its innocent victims. 

COOPERATIVE INSURANCE, upon the Mutual plan of a Bene- 
fit Fund, has recently been fully tested, and its success as a sure, cheap, 
and rt liable method of making provision for dependent families has been 
incontrovertibly provtd. Over 300, COO persons are to day enjoy- 
ing its benefits in this country. In England it has been a success. 

For Circtilars and other inf>rmation, address the President or Sec'v, 
at Home Office, 16 Haw ley Street, Boston, Mass. 



TALKS 



WITH 



TEACHERS. 



By A. D. MAYO. 



BOSTON, MASS. : 
NEW -ENGLAND PUBLISHING COMPANY. 

1881. 



.»** 

v^ V 







PREFACE. 



I call this book " Talks With Teachers," because 
I am indebted to the many superior teachers who 
have honored me by their confidence and affection for 
almost everything I value in it. What is herein 
written is an honest attempt to photograph the flying 
impressions of the visits of many years to many vari- 
eties of schools. It may be that some things of 
daily occurrence in the school-room will impress the 
teacher with a new meaning, when reflected back from 
the mind of an observant and sympathetic layman. 
Perhaps a long service, as a labor of love, in that 
half-way house of American education, the office of 
"school committee-man," may excuse an attempt to 
awake the soul of our young teachers and open their 
eyes, at once, to the hidden realm of child - land and 
the great visible world of American out -door life. If 
I can bring the teacher, the children, the parents, and 
the people to know each other better and " work to- 
gether for good," I will not be sorry I have written 

this book. 

A. D. M. 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

I. HaB She Failed? 9 

II. Reservoirs and Streams, - 14 

III. The Cross in the Schoolroom, - 19 

IV. Some College Presidents and Coeducation, 22 
V. The Clergy and the Common Schools, 27 

VI. Thanksgiving for Hard Times, - - 31 

VII. The Neglected Classes, - 33 

VIII. Teachers to the Front, 37 

IX. The Teacher and the Public, - - 41 

X. The Schoolmaster and the People, - 46 

XI. "Ten Great Gals," 51 

XII. The Mother-tongue in the Schools, 55 

XIII. "In Loco Parentis," 60 

XIV. The Other-wise Men of the East, - 64 
XV. School Supervision in New England (2), 69 

XVI. "The Child Grew," 80 

XVII. Women at the Polls, - 84 

XVIII. The Spirit of the New Education, - 86 

XIX. Literary Assumptions about the Com- 
mon Schools, 94 

XX. School plus Teacher, - 101 

XXI. The Laborer and her Hire, - - - 106 

XXII. John's Object-lesson, - 111 

XXIII. Home Missions for the Schools, - 113 

XXIV. The Student's Sister, 117 
XXV. Camilla in the Schoolroom, - - 120 



Vlll 

xxvr. 

XXVII. 

XXVIII. 

XXIX. 

XXX. 
XXXI. 

XXXII. 

XXXIII. 

XXX I Y. 

XXXV. 

XXXVI. 

XXXVII. 

XXXVIII. 

XXXIX. 

XL. 

XLI. 



CONTENTS. 

Page. 

A Child's Library, 125 

The People and the Schools, - 128 

A Smattering of Things, - - 132 
Some Grounds for the Support of Higher 

Education by the State, - - 136 
The Common Schools and their Riders, 140 
Speakers and Hearers in School Con- 
ventions, ------ 145 

"Too Thin," - 150 

Keep the Best School, ... 156 

Good Reading, 161 

The New Obscurantists, - 165 

The Social Side of It, ... 173 

Broad-guage Teaching, - 177 

Grade Your School, - 185 

Hard-Pan ----- - 18S 

Christmae, ------ 192 

Mechanism versus Mind, - - - 197 



TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



HAS SHE FAILED? 



We strolled into " No. 5 " of the Hickory street 
grammar school-house, on a hot July afternoon. Before 
the door stood the mistress of ceremonies, occupied in 
developing American raw material into American citi- 
zenship. Judging from a somewhat careful inspection, 
we should say the material was at the average grade of 
the average New-England city, every civilized clime and 
nationality heing represented, with a sprinkling of 
young Chinese " princes " and Japanese " noblemen." 
But, just then, our little architect of Bepublican citi- 
zenship was at a dead-lock. In front of her wriggled 
little " Patsy," the evil genius of the school, hung on 
wires, every joint and muscle, hair and eye-winker, 
revolving "on its own hook," to the infinite delight of 
all the fun-loving youngsters in range of his gyrations. 
Over there, in the northwest corner, sulks " Pompey,"' 
a young American citizen of African descent, via "old 
Virginia," as grouty and glum as if he pondered the 
wrongs of his race for the last two centuries. At the 
center of operations, with face whittled down to the 
keenness of a sharp-set razor, bolt upright, with a devil 
in his eye, towered long-legged " Sam," the promising 
sprout of the shrewdest horse-jockey in town ; apt at 
his lessons, but a creature too deep in his mischief for 

B 



10 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

" any fellow to find out/' even though the " fellow" were 
"woman in the school-room." And at the opposite 
angle, filling her seat with a great spread of frowsy 
hair, freckles, and unwashed finery, lolled big Laura, 
sole daughter of a Teutonic sire ; while near enough 
for all purposes of young feminine friskiness, like a lost 
ray of sunshine trying to escape from a dark room, flashed 
little Amy, the last new scholar sent in by her Kanuck 
operative parents, who are terribly annoyed that they 
cannot "work" her in the mills instead of giving her 
twenty weeks of school. 

What with this " conflict of the ages " and national- 
ities, this afternoon evolution of the races, our poor 
schoolmistress stood like the old-style figure of " Patience 
on a monument, smiling at Grief." Right lovely she 
certainly was ; of good blood and culture ; a faithful 
member of the church ; a dutiful daughter ; possibly 
beloved by somebody who was hard at work to relieve 
her from this purgatory; doing her little best to work 
out the radical problem of American civilization on a 
salary of $450 per year, with sweeping fires of criticism 
from the press, drawing-room, and pulpit thrown in. 
We sat out the afternoon, saw a good deal that merci- 
fully was witholden from her weary eyes, and, walking 
home* pondered the question, " Has She Failed ? " 

Half a dozen great religious journals, within the last 
few weeks, have very positively asserted that she, and 
all the like of her, have failed. " The common school 
has failed ! " comes down to us in thunder tones, out 
of a cloud-land of judgment, from these hallowed pre- 
cincts. It teaches too much religion, and even dares 
to use the Bible as a reading-book ! shouts No. 1. It 
ducates Patsy and Pompey and Sam and their "affin- 
ities " in school-room deviltry, " out of their sphere," 



HAS SHE FAILED f 11 

groans No. 2. It doesn't send out the average Yankee 
boy at fourteen (what no boy of any nation ever was) 
an expert in "industrial training," chimes in No. 3. It 
casts the spiritual nature into a slough of abominations, 
responds the good old Pope, from across the water ; and 
Bishop McQuade intones "Amen." And so on. Each 
differs from the other in the special location of the fail- 
ure ; their testimonies are apt to conflict ; but they all 
come to the same melancholy ending, — " The common 
school has failed, and must be reconstructed from the 
bottom according to our new patent." 

Yet it is difficult to see why Mr. Bob Ingersoll and 
the orators of the Lake Pleasant " Reform " Camp- 
meeting, cannot walk out of the churches of each de- 
nomination of Christians represented by those oracular 
"organs," any Sunday morning, and prefer the same 
charge. The parsons and the churches stand before 
the people in America, on precisely the same ground as 
the teachers and the schools, so far as the results on 
their hearers and disciples are concerned. Both are 
the work of the American people, acting in perfect free- 
dom ; doing the best known to them as practicable to 
be done, under the circumstances, to elevate the average 
American into the ideal man. We suppose they all 
make a great many mistakes; grope their way through' 
twilight realms of spiritual uncertainty, and are never 
sure of immediate results. Certainly the church and 
the religious press, so far, have achieved no such over- 
mastering success here in the United States as justifies- 
them in throwing stones at the windows of the common 
school-house. With two hundred and fifty years free 
swing at the people, they have neither been able to pre- 
vent the most terrible civil war of modern times, nor 
curb the insanity for wicked speculation, nor make New. 



12 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

York a paradise, or Washington a forecourt of Heaven ; 
not even been able always to hold their own bishops 
and deacons and " pillars " back from the most vulgar 
and violent phases of very commonplace sin. That is 
just what friend Bob and the Lake Pleasant orators of 
all sexes are crying out in a shrill twang, like a cracked 
fife at a country-training. 

But when these religious organs reply, "We work 
in the face of the one radical difficulty in this lower 
world, — the free will of wicked and foolish men "; — we 
accept the defence. We do not excuse the churches 
and the sacred editors from doing their utmost to per- 
suade men to humble their wicked and foolish wills to 
accordance with the will of God ; but we understand 
the realm of the laborer on spiritual and mental material 
is not the realm of mathematical certainties and natural 
forces. If Smith and Wesson's new machinery is per- 
fectly adjusted, there can be no failure in the revolver 
that comes forth from their shop. But let the parson 
be St. Paul himself, or the schoolmistress the flower of 
the Christian civilization of old Massachusetts, yet, 
Patsy and Sam and Pompey and the girls aforesaid, 
have each a power given them to hold all this at bay 
till the end of time. And just now these religious or- 
gans are hotly discussing the question if they have not 
the power to do this forever, even to baffle God Al- 
mighty himself through ages of infinite wickedness. 

We know that our dear little schoolmistress in No. 5 
has toiled there, through sun and shadow, these ten 
years ; has sent up some five hundred children, of " all 
sorts and conditions," into the grades above, with rather 
more than usual success; has kept her temper, so that 
her smile is like a sunrise ; has not lost her power of 
lying awake half a night and crying over the obduracy 



HAS SHE FAILED? 13 

of poor Fatsy and Sain and all the rest of them ; that 
now the older ones begin to come back to call upon her, 
and she sees that a good deal of good seed she thought 
gobbled up by the foul birds of the school-room has 
struck a vital spot and borne much fruit. We know she 
is a whole-souled, well-trained American woman; work- 
ing under the direction of a dozen of the wisest and 
best men and women of the city; doing better work 
every year, and praying without ceasing for grace to do 
better. So we conclude she has not failed, though she 
does read a little of the Bible to her uneasy flock every 
school-morning; does not turn out experts of fourteen 
years for the counting-rooms, the mills, and the farms; 
does finally get into the head of Fraulein Freckleface 
and Mademoiselle Kanuck to make an effort to rise 
above their "present sphere" of untidy, uncombed, 
rowdy girlhood; does succeed in spoiling a good horse- 
jockey in Sam, and sprouting a scientific professor. 
She succeeds and fails in the same way the American 
common school succeeds and fails ; just as the American 
church, American good society, American politics, Amer- 
ican business, — all things distinctively American, suc- 
ceed and fail ; a good deal of pretty lamentable failure 
all round, but, on the whole, a people, in 1878, of 
40,000,000, a good deal ahead of the crowd of 20,000,000 
that wrestled with the giant of republicanism in our 
boyhood. 



14 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



RESERVOIRS AND STREAMS. 

When a very small boy, we learned that a running 
stream was not a reliable motive-power for our toy 
water-wheel ; and one of our earliest recollections is 
our success in damming a little rill near the school- 
house, and thereby securing a small mill-pond that 
turned our miniature works all through a dry summer. 
It seems to us that a good many of our pretentious 
common-school reformers never learned in their child- 
hood the advantage of a reservoir, either in mechanics 
or in the State. They perpetually insist on locating 
their water-wheel in the middle of a running stream ; 
forgetting that the liveliest brook is a variable quantity, 
and the most exuberant current of "youthful energy 
will run out, if put too early to the work of turning the 
great mill-wheel of American life. 

Indeed, the great defect in American society comes 
from the necessity of a new country to locate its water- 
wheels on running streams. It is next to impossible to 
convince the sharp boys and girls of one of our new 
States of the necessity of laying up a store of informa- 
tion, of rehearsing the work of life, of training their 
faculties, and using the experience of the past as a spir- 
itual capital for their own beginning in life. Why 
should the precocious American boy, who at fifteen is 
further ahead than a German or English lad at twenty 
in the ways of " getting on," be compelled to smother 
his aspirations by four years' general cultivation in the 
high school, or even a thorough study of the first prin- 
ciples of the trade or profession at which he aims ? 



RESERVOIRS AND STREAMS. 15 

Why not " cut in," at once, and learn to farm, trade, 
preach, teach, " run a machine," or go to congress by 
doing the thing itself ? This is the common American 
way, still defended by a good many successful men, in 
all walks of life, as a new discovery of our republican 
society. If these people would sit down and cast a look 
along their backward path, count the innumerable wrecks 
of life, ability, and character in that fearful war and 
realize that they are the few survivors of the most waste- 
ful method of generating social power, they might re- 
vise their hasty and peremptory opinion. 

The fact is, the great curse of American life, to-day, 
is the lack of competent knowledge, trained faculty, and 
reserved force in our industrial and professional life. 
The country is swarming with young people as " smart 
as a steel-trap," up to anything, from a peanut stand to 
the presidency ; — a continent full of wild colts on the 
" keen jump" for the " good time coming." Our pro- 
fessions sway hither and thither in every gust of popu- 
lar caprice ; our trade vibrates on the edge of a game of 
chance ; our legislatures, even the high and mighty 
congress at Washington, perpetually try to legislate the 
impossible ; and society, itself, becomes a feverish dream 
from this impatient and shallow theory of education. 
Bad enough in the earlier periods of national life, when 
it was a necessity, it becomes suicidal now that the re- 
public is called to its place among the leading powers 
of the world. A wild bull careering over a Texas 
prairie is picturesque, but a wild bull charging down 
Broadway is a horror. There have been times when 
there was no great danger in the experimental antics of 
American youth, for America, itself, was a group of set- 
tlements in the wilderness ; and if society became too 
hot for the rabid originality of any man, he could go off 



16 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

into the woods, stake out a new metropolis, arid "grow 
up with the country." But in such a cluster of Com 
monwealths as are now packed between Boston Bay 
#nd St. Pauls, this style of operating in every region of 
life is yearly becoming more destructive. The man 
who fancies these great States are to be handled by a 
generation of boys that pitch into life at fifteen, and of 
girls who shoulder the trails of their " pull-backs " at 
twelve ; with the average newspaper, and the competi- 
tions of an American life for an university ; will wake 
up some election morning, as the sleepers on the Mill- 
river bank were aroused, by the noise of a down-rush- 
ing destruction. We are now in the agonies of 
apprehension, fighting in the darkness of a whirlwind 
that threatens to blow down the best things in Amer- 
ica ; a tempest raised from the hot whirl of our crude 
and crazy habit of industrial and professional life. 

And now, as if we had not enough of this running 
the social machinery of a continent with a variable 
mountain-torrent as a motive-power, certain of our bril- 
liant preachers, journalists, and labor-reformers, are 
raising the cry that even the little head of water we 
raise by the five years' general training in the common 
school shall be let off, and infants, from six to twelve, 
be launched at once upon "industrial training." This 
is simply a bid for general industrial bewilderment ; an 
aggravation of all our present social and civil disorders. 
It would take away, especially, from the children of 
operatives, small mechanics, and day-laborers, their only 
hope of laying up a capital of information and general 
mental discipline, invaluable, just now, to every Amer- 
ican child. It would let loose upon States like Massa- 
chusetts and Ohio, a vast multitude of youth, with no 
habits of mental discipline, no stock of general informa- 



RESERVOIRS AND STREAMS. 17 

tion, no reserve of moral or spiritual force, — taught 
only to do one thing, and, like the European workman, 
fatally dependent on that one chance for daily bread. 
The whole scheme is a hair-brained, wholesale project 
for re-producing in America the classes that are already 
becoming the terror of all the European empires, with 
the added danger that every one of these graduates, in 
America, is a voter, and a ver} r possible candidate for 
any position in civil or professional life. 

No thoughtful school-man, or real statesman doubts 
that the common school that educates the mass of 
American children, below the age of twelve years, is 
capable of great improvement in many ways. It is 
certain that the great need of our industrial classes is a 
system of industrial education, at least as thorough as 
that now furnished to the professional classes. But it 
is just as evident that the reforms in the common school 
should all aim at the more thorough training of all the 
powers, the more effectual opening of all highways to 
knowledge, and the generating of that roundabout 
habit of the whole manhood and womanhood, which 
qualifies the citizen to deal with life, as it now is in the 
reconstructed republic. To pull down this dam, drain 
off this reservoir of national power, and trust to an ed- 
ucation of the masses which makes the getting a living 
a child's problem from the cradle, is like building a fac- 
tory on an island in the Connecticut, to run as the 
river may choose to help it on, with no barrier between 
it and the White Mountains in the weeks of the spring 
freshet. It is also the deliberate conviction of the wisest 
masters of technical instruction that their pupils suc- 
ceed in proportion to the amount of general informa- 
tion, discipline, and mature capacity they bring to their 
studies. Indeed, the warning of our whole past, the 



18 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

solemn counseling of the present, and the outlook of 
our future, are all in the direection of a general educa- 
tion in home, school, and church, which shall hring out 
a generation in which is garnered up a reserve of knowl- 
edge, power, and character far beyond that of any pre- 
vious era in our affairs. Build the dam stronger than 
ever ; store away among the secret hollows of all the 
upper regions of the national life, mighty lakes in quiet 
reservoirs ; place at the gateways better men, more 
thoroughly trained to let on the water ; and a new hope 
will dispel our anxious foreboding for the years to come. 



THE CROSS IN THE SCHOOL -ROOM. 19 



THE CROSS IN THE SCHOOL-ROOM, 

We were talking with a group of young ladies, the 
other day, about a new teacher, just brought to their 
school from a neighboring State. They had fallen in 
love with her, at first, evidently in a very genuine way. 
Especially they were charmed by a wonderful interest 
she manifested in them, — the bringing her womanhood 
into line with their girlhood, — the indefinable some- 
thing which publishes as clearly as if it had been written 
on the school-house door, that the mistress is not only 
concerned that the pupil shall learn her lesson, but shall 
assimilate knowledge, develop power, and be more a 
woman for the life in school. 

The following day we happened to get on the track 
of the private history of this new school mistress. Six 
months ago she was in a position where a proposition to 
take a school at $600 a year would not have been looked 
at. Another sort of life, dear to the heart and enticing 
to the imagination of the average young lady, was almost 
in her hands. But one morning, in August, she woke 
up to find her castle in the air changed to a fog-bank, 
rapidly dissolving under the hot sun of tragic reality, 
and herself utterly dependent on her daily labor for her 
daily bread. Then this providential call appeared, and 
she is, to-day, the spiritual mother of a group of girls 
who look up to and love her for what she is to them, all 
unconscious of the motive power behind the soul-screen 
of her lofty reserve. 

That is the secret of her success ; and that is the 
secret motive power in thousands of school-rooms ? all 



20 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

over the land. Times of revolution are always times of 
affliction, anxiety, and peril for the best young women 
of a nation. There are multitudes of the noblest and 
loveliest girls in America, to-day, who bear a cross 
so black and heavy that, when it was first cast on their 
tender shoulders they fell to the earth in despair. 
Only after a discipline best known to such as they, have 
they staggered up to their feet, and found out the least 
painful way of carrying their burden, and going on in 
the lot appointed. They do not all bear the cross 
sweetly. Too many conquer, as far as the heroism 
goes, but come out sharp, fretful, morbid, bearing their 
black burden with a sort of defiance that challenges ad- 
miration ; or shrinking off into the by-ways of a reserve 
that shuts them up in a "woman's prison" for life. It 
is hard to say to a noble young woman, whose spiritual 
atmosphere is all the time exasperating, depressing, or 
strangely confusing her classes, that she is becoming 
unfit to be the guide of childhood; that even her her- 
oism is worn so like a shining coat of brazen mail, that 
it dazzles the eyes of the little ones. But it must often 
be said. And were the secrets of all hearts in the 
school-house laid bare, it would be seen that one of the 
most frequent causes of failure, especially in our young 
women teachers, is the failure to bear the cross aright 
in the sight of the children. 

But, now and then, one is enabled, like our new school- 
mistress, to transform her cross from a black horror, 
appalling and hateful to the eyes of the little ones, to a 
flower-wreathed branch of the tree of life. Then, when 
her sharp sorrow, or grinding anxiety, only makes her 
more gentle and forbearing and sympathetic, — more 
tender in shielding them from the rasping of premature 
trial, and more faithful in doing her work for mind, 



TLTE CROSS IN THE SCHOOL -ROOM. 21 

heart, and soul, — she brings into the presence of her 
little kingdom a queenly power, by which all hearts are 
won, and lives are moulded as willing clay in the hands 
of the artist. No one among her little loves may divine 
the reason for the worship that goes out to her as nat- 
urally as a child's rejoicing at the first glimpse of a 
sunny morning; but all the same the cross of amaranths 
transforms the school-room with a light and fragrance 
like that wafted from the gardens of the better land. 

We never heard of anybody who seriously objected to 
this style of teaching "religion and good morals" in 
the common school. Nobody's "right of conscience" 
is involved when such a woman rules from the desk, al- 
though every child on the benches is brought by a sweet 
and mighty compulsion to a willing submission. And 
without this central motive power of a consecrated 
womanhood in the teacher, every attempt at moulding 
character is a foreordained failure. But with a woman 
on the teacher's throne who has learned to take her cross 
into the school-room and bear it so that her scholars are 
won to an adoring love for all the Christian graces in- 
carnate in herself, a world full of difficulties and entan- 
glements disappears under tin 1 enchantment of the one 
power that guides the world, — the might of a manhood 
or womanhood fashioned in the image of the Prince of 
Men. 



22 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



Some College Presidents and Co-education. 

The new Smith College for women, at Northampton, 
Mass., is rising into deserved estimation. Beginning 
with an entering class of fifteen, it has now seventy- 
two freshmen, and boasts of a curriculum that rivals 
Amherst College, upon the opposite side of the valley. 
Its buildings and social arrangements are excellent, 
and no lovelier place for a college-life can be found than 
old Northampton. With all proper discount for the 
enthusiasm of its special friends, it must be said that 
no American college for girls has a better promise of 
eminence in a not far distant future. 

A good many friends of Smith College are thinking, 
just now, that this admirable institution is strong 
enough in its own merits to get bravely on without the 
peculiar style of advertising that appears in the pub- 
lished report of a lecture, several times delivered by its 
president, Dr. Seelye. In this address the learned Doc- 
tor not only arrays himself among the foes of coeduca- 
tion, but presses the point in a way that calls for a little 
friendly dissent. We look to the president of a 
woman's college for a style of argumentation upon these 
delicate questions of education, that will bear the in- 
spection of the finest intelligence. But we confess to a 
sudden shock of disappointment to find the good Doctor 
repeating over the regulation assertions about the dan- 
ger of associating boys and girls in study, with a few 
absurd stories and jokes from Western journals, at the 
expense of coeducational colleges, flung in as a basket of 
bouquets at a rather dull entertainment. 



CO -EDUCATION. 23 

For example, how can the president be sure that even 
all his own patrons absolutely prefer a college for " girls 
only/' in view of the notorious fact that all the old, 
established universities, east of the Hudson, obstinately 
shut their doors against women ? The only colleges, of 
national fame in New England, that admit women with 
men, are those at Boston and Middletown. The Bos- 
ton University numbers among its students some of the 
finest girls from the most " select " circles of that con- 
servative old city, and gathers to its recitation-rooms 
young ladies from all the region round about. We are 
glad that so many young women are taking the full 
college course at Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley ; but if 
Harvard, Yale, Brown, Tufts, Dartmouth, and all the 
time-honored colleges for men, were also flung open, 
with suitable living arrangements, for the reception of 
girls, we should know a great deal better than even 
President Seelye now can, the actual feeling of the best 
people and the superior students on this vexed question. 

Again : if, as the Doctor asserts, there are not as 
many lady-students in all the coeducational colleges in 
the United States as the one hundred and Mtj now 
in Smith, it is certainly unreasonable to expect that 
these one hundred and fifty girls, sown over half a con- 
tinent, will civilize the score of colleges to which they 
are admitted. He charges that the presence of girls 
does not civilize ; that coeducational colleges still haze. 
We are not aware that the presence of two or three 
young women in any crowd of two or three hundred 
young men, would change their vulgar habits at once. 
Indeed, while some husbands still swear at and even beat 
their wives, and now and then an infuriate woman de- 
molishes her unaccommodating partner, it must be evi- 
dent that the association of the sexes is not a panacea 



24 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

for all evils. All that a sensible defender of coeduca- 
tion pretends is, that in school, as everywhere else in 
life, man and woman, property associated, are in a safer 
and more natural state than when separated. We hold 
that a fair review of the experiment of coeducation in 
the United States has demonstrated that fact. There 
are no schools in America so free from the vices and 
vulgarities that still disgrace our great colleges, as the 
academical, normal, and high schools and colleges where 
men and women are trained and taught together. 

It hardly seems to us that the girl-graduates of Smith 
will quite relish the retailing about the country, by 
their president, of stale newspaper yarns about eccen- 
tric and mischievous students in the coeducational col- 
leges of the West. The West is a far-off land" to some 
of our Eastern college presidents, and it seems to be 
considered safe to attribute a good deal to Western col- 
leges of which their officers and students are ignorant. 
We suspect that if the memories of the educated moth- 
ers of the valley of the Connecticut w^re ransacked, 
there might be revived several volumes of laughable 
stories about the pranks of boarding-school girls at Mrs. 
Willard's and other famous seminaries, that would match 
the president's little list of jokes. Only last summer, we 
listened for an hour to a description of life at a cele- 
brated select academy for " girls of the best families," 
in old Connecticut half a century ago, which rivaled 
the most grotesque and pronounced demonstration of 
even the bloomer student in the "new university " out 
West. It is a melancholy fact that no school, high or 
low, from old Oxford to new Smith, ever yet invented a 
strainer sufficiently fine to strain out all its own black 
sheep ; and the years that come within the scope of the 
" higher education " are proverbially the season for 



CO -EDUCATION. 25 

"sowing wild oats." It will hardly do for either the 
exclusive friends of male colleges or female seminaries 
to challenge comparison in this direction, — certainly not 
till the rowdyism of old Princeton, and the facts about 
the average girls' school, are explained away. 

There seems to us a singular lack of delicacy in such 
wholesale assaults upon coeducation, as some of our 
New-England college presidents have fathered within 
the past year. When we look over the whole country, 
and its past twenty years of educational life, and see 
what a crowd of our noblest and most successful girls 
have obtained their entire education in schools of this 
sort, the levity with which these eminent gentlemen 
dispose of the girl-graduates is somewhat suggestive of 
limited information. All the regulation arguments 
against coeducation apply with special force to our sys- 
tem of free high and State normal schools, and country 
academies; for certainly the girl-pupils in these schools 
are less mature and more open to its peculiar dangers 
than older students in colleges. Is it quite safe to fling 
about these wholesale disparagements, to say nothing 
of tossing withered bouquets of newspaper squibs at 
this great throng of young women, now filling all the 
positions of life from professor in Wellesley and Yassar 
to wife and mother in the humblest home ? Will even 
President Seelye venture the assertion that, as a class, 
the body of American young women-graduates of our high, 
normal, and academical schools ; of Oberlin, Antioch, the 
Boston University, Cornell, and other well-known collegi- 
ate schools ; are inferior in any womanly way to the grad- 
uates of seminaries and colleges for girls only ? If any 
man does venture that assertion, he will be enlightened 
by a call to the front of the women who have presumed 
to walk with their brothers and boy-friends through 



26 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

the gate of culture into the temple of American life. 
The whole question of the higher education of woman 
is, just now, in a most interesting condition for exper- 
iment and observation. It is hardly safe to dogmatize 
on either side beyond the range of achieved results. No 
wise friend of coeducation denies that for large classes 
of girls a separate, often a very exclusive, education is 
best, as the sensible public schoolman is the best friend 
of good private schools. But when the friends and 
teachers of this class of girls assume that it represents 
the sole type of legitimate Christian womanhood, and 
insinuate the odium of Bohemianism or vulgarity on 
the other, probably larger, class, to whom coeducation 
is an especial help, we should cry, — halt ! We are sorry 
that our New-England college presidents have, so far, 
failed to treat this question with that breadth of view 
and fullness of information such a theme, treated by 
such men, demands. It will not settle anything in 
American life to dogmatize from the chair of the proud- 
est old Eastern university, or the newest prosperous 
college for woman. Let us try to cultivate a catholic 
spirit, and keep our eyes open to what our daughters are 
really doing in this new world, and all will come out to 
the glory of true womanhood and the vindication of the 
truth. 



THE CLERGY AND THE COMMON SCHOOLS. 27 



THE CLERGY AND THE COMMON SCHOOLS. 

With due respect to the body of eminent divines of 
New Haven, who have undertaken to decide the vexed 
question of "the Bible in the schools " by the magic of 
" 30 per cent.," we fear that their elaborate scheme of 
children's worship is a failure. Instead of a practical 
arrangement for the instruction of New Haven children 
in the great cardinal principles of Christian morality, 
in which all good men agree, and the unsectarian use of 
the Bible as the acknowledged handbook of morality ; 
with such brief, reverent, daily acknowledgement of de- 
pendence on God as none but a proselyting atheist could 
object to; these learned doctors have presented us with 
the plan of a new " Union Church," in which the lion of 
the old Connecticut puritanism and the lamb of our new 
American Catholicism may "lie down together" and be 
at rest. As an ingenious plan for constructing a new 
Union Children's Church on the scale of 30 per cent, (why 
not 7 per cent., 7 being the biblical as well as the bank 
number), it is a new clerical curiosity. As a serious 
arrangement for the settlement of the question of " re- 
ligion in the common schools," it will fall dead, another 
victim to the obstinate disease of clericalism, which dies 
so hard, even under the shadow of old Yale and new 
Sheffield. 

The radical trouble with this absurd " compromise " 
is the underlying assumption that, in public affairs, the 
clergy of our various American churches are the repre- 
sentatives of the people. Even in the new Congrega- 
tionalism of Connecticut, the clergy do not assume to 
be, in any ecclesiastical sense, the representative of the 



28 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

churches. But Father Fitzpatrick has set a clever trap 
in the assumption that the whole hody of clergy, in 
matters of State, sustain the same relation to the whole 
people that he assumes as representative of the infallible 
papal power ; and Dr. Bacon and his associates seem to 
have fallen into it. In the United States of America, 
even in the State of Connecticut, a clergyman is only 
a citizen, entitled to the weight and following belong- 
ing to his wisdom and virtue as a man. The church 
in Connecticut, as an ecclesiastical establishment, has 
absolutely nothing to do with the common schools; and 
no clergyman as clergyman or priest, has rights inside 
a school-house other than P. T. Barnum as representa- 
tive of his " great moral show." 

The State of Connecticut is compelled to teach and 
train all the school-children in the great principles of 
morality, which underlie Republican institutions ; which 
are the corner-stone alike of that glorious old Common- 
wealth, and of her system of common education. A vast 
majority of the people believe the Bible, discreetly and 
like any other text-book, like the dictionary, like the 
school treatises on the "new science," is the great hand- 
book of this morality, and resent the stigma cast upon 
it by the secularists in its banishment from the teach- 
er's desk. The method of using it, as the whole policy 
of the "morning exercise," is a matter to be determined 
by public expediency. It can be used, and is used in 
thousands of the best schools of the country, in a way 
to offend and oppress nobody but a little clique of ob- 
stinate sectarians, clerical and lay churchmen, and equally 
obstinate secularists. The agitation against such use 
has not come out of the brain or the heart of the people, 
but from the theological and anti-ecclesiastical "con- 
science" of these two classes. It is the common fallacy 



THE CLERGY AND THE COMMON SCHOOLS. 29 

of both these disputants to represent the question as a 
dispute between the members of different churches, to 
be arranged by a compromise engineered by "represen- 
tative " advocates of different schools. But the matter 
is simply a question of the best method of training the 
children in the common morality of a civilized State in- 
habited by Christian people. The whole discipline, or- 
ganization, method of instruction in the public schools, 
assumes the Christian moralities as an essential element 
in the free education of the people ; and the exercises of 
devotion and formal drill in these moralities are little 
beyond an outward representation of this moral disci- 
pline which is the heart of the school. 

When any body of the clergy, however learned and 
beloved by the people, assume or accept the work of 
parceling out the children in a Union-school Church, 
arranged on a scale of " 30 per cent.," they fail to per- 
ceive the fundamental relations of religion to the State. 
But the trouble of New Haven is not of to-day. When 
that city permitted a Catholic priest to dictate the 
organization and officering of one of its public schools, 
it fell into the trap the bishops of that church are all 
the time setting for our communities. The assumption 
that the children of Catholic parents are the constituency 
of a priest, ivho, as their representative, makes a treaty 
with the Government, and settles all differences, as the 
ambassador of a foreign power, ivill never be tolerated by 
the American people. It is the root of a treason and a 
rebellion a thousand times more dangerous than the 
slave-holders' revolt, inasmuch as it would change our 
form of government from a State ruled by the whole 
people, to a State kept afloat by a series of compromises 
between the representatives of a contentious crowd of 
religious and anti-religious organizations. 

We regard the New Haven clerical settlement of the 



30 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

" religious difficulty " in the schools as the plan of the 
extreme secularists, a vital misconception of the ques- 
tion. The question is not how to make a school in 
which every religious and anti-religious sect shall he 
fitly represented ; or how to carry on a school in a way 
that shall offend the " conscience " of no man, woman, 
or child in the community. It is simply a question of 
the best way of instructing and training children in the 
fundamental moralities which lie at the basis of a free 
State inhabited by Christian people, and, therefore, 
founded on the Christian system of morals. What text- 
books, what methods of instruction, what form of disci- 
pline are best adapted to accomplish this work ? To 
shirk the obligation to teach and train the school-chil- 
dren in Christian morals, is to let the bottom fall out of 
the public school. The best method of doing this is a 
fair subject of discussion. The remark of one of the 
members of the New Haven School Committee, that 
" half a dozen common-sense laymen would have settled 
the matter without trouble,"' savors strongly of common- 
sense. At any rate this compromise of the clergy is 
about the worst way of settlement that can be devised, 
and does not recommend the system of political phil- 
osophy current in the upper clerical circles of that 
renowned city. 

While we write, the news comes that the School Com- 
mittee of New Haven have very properly tossed this 
elaborate clerical plan of school-worship into the waste- 
basket, and by an overwhelming majority restored the 
simple unsectarian use of the Bible common in Ameri- 
can schools. It is a refreshing evidence of the intention 
of the average citizen to repudiate alike the extreme 
clerical and secular view of the State, and to go on in- 
structing the school-children in practical morality, 
backed by the Bible and American common-sense. 



THANKSGIVING FOR HARD TIMES. 31 



THANKSGIVING FOR HARD TIMES. 

One of the most valuable lessons of the past bitter 
experience of hard times to the whole American people, 
has been the absolute necessity of knowledge and trained 
ability to ensure permanent success in private or public 
affairs. In a nation like India, where a dozen experts 
in council manage for 250,000,000 of people, popular 
ignorance, for a time, may be excused, although at the 
penalty of future revolution. But in a republic like 
the United States of America, popular ignorance is 
simply national suicide. What does the ugly fact that 90 
per cent, of all Americans entering business fail declare, 
except that 90 per cent, of Americans are ignorant 
and untrained in their occupation ? The conceited igno- 
rance of thousands of young men who have madly rushed 
upon the most complicated operations of business, ex- 
plains their mournful collapse. The deplorable confu- 
sion of ideas and ignorance of great masses of our newty 
naturalized population explains the existence of the 
spectre of communism which has even startled old Bos- 
ton out of her sobriety. The verdant notion that a 
native American can do anything by virtue of native 
smartness and indomitable energy, has brought success 
to a few who have learned the laws of work as they have 
gone on, but has strewn the land with wrecks of dishon- 
esty and folly. The crazy ignorance of vast masses of 
people in all our States is the great dismal swamp out 
of which rise the cloudy theories of finance, government, 
and society, which keep us in constant alarm. 

The hard times have opened our eyes to the fact that 
the American young man of to-day no longer lives in 



32 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

the provincial world of the fathers ; that the Republic 
has cast off its round-a-bout and put on the apparel of a 
first-class nation ; that business and public and social 
economy are sciences and only intelligent and skilled 
labor can look for a reward. The smart boy who now 
tries to " cut in " ahead of his oompanions by dashing 
into business before his mental beard is grown, will be 
picked up by an ambulance a little farther on. The 
brawling agitator who is shot into the Legislature on a 
"people's ticket," will turn up the ignorant member of 
the House who will be laughed back to his clumsy work. 
Every class of people who despise knowledge and trained 
skill in any profession, must now take " back seats." 
We may storm and rave against this law as we will, 
but God's way is always the best way. It is best the 
work of this world should be done by men and women 
who bring mind, information and superior manhood and 
womanhood, to every task. 

The people are beginning to see this. There never 
was a time when questions about the education and 
training of American children were so eagerly debated 
as now. During the past four years of financial disas- 
ter, the stream of private benefaction in the endowment 
of colleges and superior schools has flowed steadily on. 
Our public schools are crowded, and doing such work as 
was never before known. The wise and devoted teacher, 
in all kinds of schools, is coming to the front. And in 
all professions, skilled labor and intelligent workmen 
are the demand of the day. It will be harder times 
than ever during the next generation for ignorance, con. 
ceit, and crudeness, ever} T where. But what a blessing 
to the country to have its work of all sorts done accord- 
ing to the divine law, enacted before the foundation of 
the world ! So let us stop grumbling at the shady side 
of Providence, and thank God for hard times. 



THE NEGLECTED CLASSES. 33 



THE NEGLECTED CLASSES. 

The other day we counted one hundred children, of 
school age, playing in the street during school-hours, in 
a walk through half-a-dozen squares of the city of New 
York. One teacher told us she had refused seats to 
fifty children within the past two weeks. Here is, cer- 
tainly, a neglected class. The public schools of the 
metropolis are shamefully crowded, and yet thousands 
of children are refused instruction, and are coining up 
to swell the ranks of the ballot-box stutters, burglars, 
body-snatchers, and ring-aldermen of that sorely afflict- 
ed city. 

Here is a well-defined class that can be reached by 
legislation, backed by a vigorous public opinion. But 
there is another neglected class, in the other end of the 
metropolitan social scale, whose case seems to us even 
more hopeless than the waifs of the street. 

A committee of ladies from Fifth Avenue homes 
visited one of the best primary schools of the city, a 
few months ago, to obtain ideas about the instruction 
of a class of orphan children under their patronage 
As they left, one of them remarked to the lady principal, 
" Talk of the neglected class, — our own children, who 
are out of these admirable schools, wasting their time 
under useless private instruction, are the children to be 
pitied." 

It does not need an extensive acquaintance with the 
inside of the homes of one class of wealthy people in 
American cities, to verify the bitter words of this sharp- 
sighted mother. If there are any children who need 
c 



34 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

the prayers of the church and the sympathy of every 
good citizen, it is this increasing crowd of little ones 
who are the victims of the fashionable rage of this 
class of newly-made rich, and their snobbish imitators. 
Almost before they are out of the cradle they are cast 
into the hands of foreign nurses, to be taught a foreign 
language. Thus are they robbed of the most delight- 
ful association of home-words with the earliest recollec- 
tions of childhood. Then comes the fashionable child's- 
school, — a caricature on good instruction, — where all 
the petty conceits of infancy are nursed to mischievous 
habits, and the whims of the weak and ambitious mother 
are the unwritten law of the school-room. Or, if, by 
chance, the little ones fall into the hands of an able and 
conscientious teacher, they are victimized, out of school, 
by the persecutions of the music-teacher and the 
dancing-master, who consume their time and exhaust 
their remaining vitality. And all this goes on in the 
unnatural atmosphere of a sham gentility which drives 
without halt or remorse to social success ; sacrificing to 
that end, with the fanaticism of a pagan priest brand- 
ishing his knife above the victim upon the altar. 

No woman of average common-sense undertakes to 
defend this preposterous abuse of her children, in which 
sham instruction in school combines with a thoroughly 
unwholesome training at home to reduce their native 
vigor of body and soul* to the lowest terms. Yet 
thousands of foolish people, even in the cities of New 
England, and whole classes of " first people M in 
other parts of the Union, are offering up their little 
ones to this ruoloch of fashion ; driving them, like a 
relentless fate, into chronic invalidism of body and 
spirit ; an early death ; or that wretched life-in-death 
that the existence of multitudes of young people has 



TEE NEGLECTED CLASSES. 35 

become in the most highly- favored circles of America. 
Just now these mothers are the victims of the consider- 
able class of adventurers who ride the kindergarten 
hobby, and, with perfect ignorance of the spirit of 
Froebel, plunder a circle of rich patrons as the price of 
demoralizing their four-year-old infants. 

It is not easy to estimate the mischief that comes to 
the country from this neglected " upper class." Every 
pastor of a church, or worker in any vital corner of 
American life, is perpetually coming across this dead- 
wood in the shape of an exclusive and absurd class of 
young men and women, who, with a world of oppor- 
tunity at hand, are open to no appeal save the stimulus 
of selfishness and social success. It is no small calam- 
ity that so many of the sons and daughters of men 
who have earned a fortune by solid service in the great 
industrial interests of the Republic, should lapse away 
into this limbo of affe'ctations. The country needs the 
highest type of manhood and womanhood, especially in 
those who set the fashions of society, and, at least for a 
time, are called to the front in all good enterprises. Of 
course, this class will fall out in the race of life and its 
place be taken by young people who can do the work of 
the hour. But why should our new country be called 
to such a sacrifice, and why should wealth, honorably 
acquired by a life of toil and thought, so often entail 
the curse of imbecility upon our children ? 

The remedy is in the hands of the mothers in these 
beautiful homes. There are women enough in every 
circle of fashion who know the folly and sin of this 
abuse of childhood. It does not require a great many 
martyrs in any American city to upset a ridiculous 
fashion, especially where the soul and body of a beloved 
child is at stake. A resolute strike for the children by 



36 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

a few Christian women of wealth, would arrest atten- 
tion. A declaration of independence against the French 
nurse, the music and the dancing-master, the milliner 
and Mrs. Grundy, would meet a hearty response in 
thousands of homes now growing resttive under the 
despotism of the little tyrants. A thorough ventilation 
of our whole system of private schools in cities, and a 
peremptory demand that their teachers shall be up with 
the best methods of instruction and discipline in the 
best public schools, would lift this whole dim and con- 
fused realm into light and efficiency. 

Already we see a new class of private schools for girls 
and boys that forecast the future and strike for the 
patronage of the more sensible people who profess to 
educate their children in this way. It is a hopeful 
symptom, to be encouraged. By determined effort, 
fasting and prayer, it is possible that this demon of 
fashioneble imbecility in education may be cast out and 
the most desperately - neglected .class of children in 
America be restored to the common rights of childhood ; 
the right to eat wholesome food, breathe pure air, dress 
in plain clothing, use the feet and hands and eyes out- 
doors ; to study by good methods, play at reasonable 
hours, go to bed in season ; in short, the right to do and 
enjoy what the average American child who is educated 
in a good public school and brought up outside this 
charmed circle of youthful imbecility, now does and 
enjoys. 



TEACHERS TO THE FRONT. 37 



TEACHERS TO THE FRONT. 

There is a story of the campaign in Egypt, that at 
the beginning of an engagement, Napoleon gave the 
order, " Savans and donkeys to the rear ! " It is evi- 
dent that an engagement is impending, in which 
more than one feature of our public-school system is 
threatened. The new governor of Maine sound's the 
war-whoop against the free high school. The new 
mayor of Boston demands the sacrifice of the normal 
school on the altar of economy. In fifty large towns of 
Massachusetts, to say nothing of New England in gen- 
eral, the village reformer is fitting the crank to the 
screw that shall press out a little more of the life-blood 
from the schools, and bring their teachers a little 
nearer the financial status of the country " hired man " 
and the city servant-girl. The first governor's message 
read in the new $12,000,000 State House at Albany, 
renews the plaintive groan of rural Governor Robinson 
against the high schools as public " robbery," and flings 
a parting stone at the normal schools. Possibly the 
member whose father " didn't like Horace Mann " will 
appear in the Boston State House this winter, and call 
for an " investigation " of the educational system of the 
State. We shall be surprised if the present season 
does not reveal more than one brilliant plan for econo- 
mizing Massachusetts into a back seat among the free- 
school States. 

Meanwhile, what do our teachers propose to contrib- 
ute as their contingent in the defence of children's 
rights ? Do they propose to conform to the Napoleonic 



38 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

order of battle, and huddle in the rear, with the donkeys 
and the baggage, and let Providence take care of the 
front? So, evidently, do not the schoolmen of Ohio. 
They " took time by the forelock " last July. While 
we in New England were picnicing at the White Hills, 
they were planning a campaign at Put-in-Bay in favor 
of the general reform and elevation of the country dis- 
trict-school. During the autumn and early winter they 
have been holding a series of rousing conventions in the 
congressional districts. On the 10th of January they 
assembled at Columbus to inform the legislature of the 
educational needs of the State. Governor Bishop 
makes haste to steal their thunder by a hearty endorse- 
ment of their programme in his opening message. 
On the whole, we like this " Ohio idea." It scores one 
more mark for this magnificent State in its movement 
to the front of American affairs. 

We wish the teachers of New England, who, like the 
rest of us, are too much inclined to listen to the reports 
of Western school-keeping as a placid patriarch at the 
breakfast-table glances over his gold spectacles at the 
ringing speech of Benjamin Franklin, Jr., home for 
college holidays, could be persuaded to take off their 
spectacles, go to the front door and actually see for 
themselves what this miscellaneous educational row in 
the street is about. But we confess to a little sinking 
of the heart when we contemplate the placid attitude of 
a good many of the fraternity who seem to imagine the 
day of battle a fit holiday for them to sort their speci- 
mens and write up their journals at the rear. A year 
ago a handful of the teachers of Maine held pleasant 
council and amicable discussion at Lewiston, the resi- 
dence of the new governor. We fancy, if he heard of 
their presence, he was not impressed with the convic- 



TEACHERS TO THE FRONT. 39 

tion that they proposed to fight verf lustily for any 
feature of the educational system of the State. Our 
late State Teachers' Association at Worcester was a 
delightful little reunion of two or three hundred supe- 
rior teachers, superintendents, and book-agents. Its 
discussions would make a useful book for leisurely 
reading at next summer's vacation. The new spelling, 
Sauveur's system of teaching foreign languages, mili- 
tary drill, the perils of declamation in high schools, the 
Alps illustrated, and Prest. Chadbourne's venerable lec- 
ture, are all topics of legitimate interest. But we failed 
to notice the slightest recognition of the fact that the 
situation was not altogether lovely. If this is all the 
eight thousand public-school teachers of Massachusetts 
have to say for themselves, one hardly wonders at the 
bated breath of Governor Talbot in his brief enigmatical 
deliverance on the crowning interest of the State ; at 
the sapient suggestions of the mayor of Worcester, or 
the fact that the second city in the Commonwealth 
could not afford to bid against Williston Seminary for 
the admirable principal of her free high school. 

Probably the New-England States never contained 
so large a number of superior teachers in public schools, 
so thoroughly devoted to the children, as to-day. As 
we meet them at institutes and conventions, they seem 
to us full of a good spirit, eager to learn the best meth- 
ods, ready, if need be, to suffer in purse and comfort for 
their schools. But we do wish we could see a little 
more of that fire in their eyes which suggests the leading 
of the attacking column at the front, rather than a prayer- 
meeting for the success of the battle at the rear. We 
believe in martyrdom, in its place ; but it strikes us 
forcibly that it is well enough to decide, in advance, 
which man is to be burned. We confess to that wicked- 



40 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

ness which would see Alderman Dickinson rather than 
Principal Fairbanks in that position, in the public 
square of Worcester. We believe the aversion to legit- 
imate public work for the schools, outside the school- 
room ; the absorption by numbers of our ablest teach- 
ers, out of school hours, in purely scholastic or literary 
occupation; the neglect by the majority of our "lady 
teachers " of any attempt at regular visitation in the 
homes of their children; the apparent indifference of 
the majority of the eminent Boston schoolmasters to 
anything outside their special " group " of schools ; the 
petty and teasing opposition of a considerable class of 
masters to the introduction of improved methods and 
the normal schools, — accounts for a great deal of the 
stupid and ugly hostility to the best features of our 
school system. Five years of such work as the five 
thousand superior teachers of Massachusetts owe, not 
only to their immediate constituency, but to the State, 
through public address, the use of the press, the en- 
lightening of influential citizens, the illustration and 
explanation of new methods to the people of every dis- 
trict, would lift Massachusetts above all danger of that 
mischievous thinking by hard-headed legislators and 
stolid school committee-men, which is the bane of school- 
work in all the American States. 



THE TEACHEB AND THE PUBLIC. 41 



THE TEACHER AND THE PUBLIC. 

In one sense the teacher of to-day has dropped out of 
large public relations, in a way that makes an unfavor- 
able contrast with the schoolmaster of a generation ago. 
In the dear old days to which Dr. Peabody so fondly 
refers, in his criticism of present school methods, the 
old-fashioned, professional schoolmaster, next to the par- 
son, was the public oracle in matters a good deal outside 
the routine of the school-room. Even in the smaller 
country towns, the group of college students and supe- 
rior young men, who " kept school " in the various dis- 
tricts at $12 per month, with perquisites of "boarding 
round" and weekly " kissing parties," for the time 
being led the intellectual life of the town, — through the 
country lyceum furnishing a weekly entertainment of 
no mean order. The schoolmistress was often the finest 
young woman of the region, and lived a good deal in the 
families of her children. Altogether, the teacher in 
New • England, a generation ago, though inferior in 
scholastic and professional ability to his successor, was 
a far more prominent character before the people than 
to-day. 

There is no doubt that this changed relation to the 
public is a positive loss of power in educational affairs. 
While the schools of New England, with the exception 
of a class of small country towns, have prodigiously im- 
proved, and the teachers, as professional workers, greatly 
surpass the masters of the old time ; it is evident that, 
as a class, they have steadily lost influence, even in 
school affairs, with the people. It is amazing to see 



42 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

the ignorance of educational matters in which multi- 
tudes of professional and superior business men are 
living. To one really acquainted with the present con- 
dition of public-school affairs, the majority of criticisms 
upon them from the daily press, especially from the pul- 
pit and sectarian journals, and not infrequently from 
college professors and eminent men of letters, have the 
same air of grotesque unreality that sets every bright 
American school-girl laughing over the estimate of 
American affairs by the average British author, bishop, 
or M. P. The great mass of these criticisms cannot 
receive a peremptory answer, owing to the curious igno- 
rance of the critic. When Mayor Pratt of Worcester 
declares the graded system of schools a failure, and 
President Eliot demands a backdown upon the ancient 
academical system, and Dr. Peabody tells us that the fam- 
ilies of New England have greatly lost interest in the 
schools their children attend, and The Churchman grave- 
ly asserts that the blackguards that upset the railroads 
a year ago were " graduates of the common schools," — 
what can be said in reply ? The only reply that touches 
the point is, — These eminent people do not know the 
common school of to-day. The off-hand opinions of the 
Boston Board of Trade, of any New-England Legisla- 
ture, of the leading women of society in any American 
city, on the public-school system, would betray the same 
picturesque bewilderment. Even the clergy of New 
Haven, with Dr. Bacon and Father Fitzpatrick at their 
head, seriously brought forth their little clerical plan 
for solving the religious difficulty on the basis of 
" thirty per cent," which has awakened a hardly-sup- 
pressed titter from Boston to Oregon. 

Now this is the real danger of the new American sys- 
tem of public schools. It has come up mainly during 



THE TEACHER AND THE PUBLIC. 43 

the last twenty years, through the zealous activity of 
leading teachers and schoolmen, and has been anchored 
in our legislation largely by the prodigious efforts of our 
foremost State and local superintendents of schools 
The teachers have, on the whole, done more to improve 
their own profession and lift up the people's school, 
than any other class. As a " reward of merit," our 
municipal reformers have selected them as the earliest 
victims upon the altar of economy. And now that the 
Union is reconstructed, gold at par, and the great 
strain of the last twenty years somewhat lightened, the 
people are, for the first time, seriously looking at this 
great structure of popular education, and asking what it 
all means. And many influential people, forgetting 
that everything else, including the Republic itself, has 
undergone the same transformation within the last gen- 
eration, are behaving as if the school interest alone 
was bound to go ambling about in the cocked hat, 
knee-buckles, and gold-headed cane of the fathers, 
"with all that implies" for the mass of the people. 

Now, one thing is evident. If our present school 
-system is to be essentially preserved, it must be through 
the education of the more intelligent and patriotic 
people of the country into the thorough appreciation of 
the educational needs and situation of the day. It 
doesn't pay to waste argument on crotchet}'' professors, 
impracticable authors, omniscient scientists, and high- 
toned leaders of the fashion. But the upper half of the 
American people are open to information, are easily ap- 
proachable, and becoming thoroughly interested in this 
matter. And now the teachers must come to the front ; 
tell the people plainly what they are trying to do for 
their children ; give the reasons for the new organiza- 
tion, methods of instruction and discipline ; vindicate 



44 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

the right of the high school and the normal school to 
support ; and show just where the new technical educa- 
tion can make a s^e connection with the puhlic schools. 
No body of women in America has now such an op- 
portunity to do any good thing in public, as the women- 
teachers to educate and lead the people in this new cam- 
paign for the children. If they will only realize the fact, 
come out from the seclusion of their present life, and rea- 
sonably improve the off-hours with the parents and the 
people in general, they can wake up the country in an 
educational revival. The American schoolmistress in 
city and country has two whole days of every school 
week, ten waking hours of every day, and a vacation 
period from one to two months in duration, outside 
the school-room. Longfellow and Taylor and Bryant 
have made a national reputation for literature in a 
smaller number of leisure hours. If these young ladies 
say they have no time to visit parents, explain school 
work, and, with all their wealth of feminine attraction, 
win over the masculine ignorance, narrowness, and in- 
corrigibility of their districts ; if they say they cannot 
form into associations for outside missionary work that, 
will tell even in the most exclusive circles, they say 
what the more thoughtful people do not believe. With 
all fair allowance for the lack of professional training 
among these women-teachers, they do know a great deal 
more than nine-tenths of the better-informed people in 
their localities concerning these things. The people 
have given them such a position as no class of women 
occupy in this Republic ; and if they accept the posi- 
tion, they must face the obligation. 

We believe the failure to do this is chiefly owing to a 
misapprehension. These young women, as a body, will 
try to do what the people expect. The upper half of 



THE TEACHER AND THE PUBLIC. 45 

the American people now do call them forth to instruct 
their constituents in the new education, and create that 
wholesome public opinion which can alone sustain it. 
And our women-teachers will find in this missionary 
field a most unexpected refreshment and relief from the 
fatigues of the school-room. In doing this work, faith- 
fully, they will gain social consideration, greatly enlarge 
their knowledge of society, and reinforce the executive 
side of their womanhood. 



46 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE PEOPLE. 

The public schoolmaster is not only a teacher of chil- 
dren inside a school-house, but a public man, as truly as 
a policeman or a president. In the older portions of 
the country, especially in New England, his prospect is 
better for a long term of service than any public ser- 
vant dependent on the election of the people. Indeed, 
a superior master may reckon on a life-lease of occupa- 
tion, plus the gratitude of a gathering crowd of youth 
and the respect of the better class of the community. 
No body of official men, save the judges, is now so 
well paid in New England as the better sort of masters. 
To no class is the public gaze so naturally directed for 
leadership in educational affairs as to them. 

How shall the masters in our public schools, includ- 
ing superintendents and teachers in special depart- 
ments, meet the demand for leadership in the defence 
and reformation of our system of public education? 

First, every man now occupied in the work of public 
instruction should put himself in hearty sympathy with 
the New Education. Not that he is bound to snap up 
every novelty in methods, or throw aside the valuable 
results of his own experience at the dictation of any- 
body. The task of awakening the " heart and soul and 
mind and strength " of a child to the pursuit of knowl- 
edge, in the large way that builds up a trained man- 
hood and womanhood, is the most difficult on earth ; so 
difficult, indeed, that we should not too severely censure 
the man who, having learned one way of doing any- 
thing good therein, is over-cautious about unrigging his 



THE* SCHOOLMASTER AND THE PEOPLE. 47 

ship and trusting to Providence for another. But be 
cause the work to be done is so great, the opportunity 
for influence so vital, we rightly demand that he who 
stands before the public as a master shall keep an open 
mind and heart, and never close the books against the 
results of experience in his profession. If anything is 
generally accepted in the higher walks of school-life, it 
is that what we call the " natural methods of educa- 
tion " are to be preferred to the mechanical habit of 
learning books by rote, and cramming the mind with 
facts which so long has been the " old man of the sea " 
astride the shoulders of the boys and girls. The 
methods of instruction taught in our best normal 
schools, and approved by the vast majority of success- 
ful teachers, have the field, and are moving in the right 
direction. 

The time has, therefore, come when a well-known 
class of masters should suspend their opposition to this 
movement, and fling open doors and windows to wel- 
come the spirit that shall revive the school. It is a 
melancholy fact that all the cities and large villages, 
even of New England, are still worried by such a class 
of obstructionists. They keep alive in the parents an 
ignorant prejudice against the best methods of instruc- 
tion. They baffle the efforts of the best people for 
effective supervision. They are at the bottom of a 
good deal of the hostility to the normal schools. They 
harass the young graduates from these schools by forc- 
ing upon them their own antiquated and barbarous style 
of stuffing the youthful mind with knowledge. Their 
intolerant and quarrelsome spirit makes them the plague 
of every school convention. They manufacture ammu- 
nition for the lofty creatures who overlook the education 
of the universe from the frost-bitten summits of high 



48 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. ^ 

journalism, and reassure the tax-payer who would 
knock the bottom out of a township to reduce the rate 
a tenth of a mill. This class will do well to open mind 
and heart to the New Education. Or, if this is too 
much to demand, let these masters try to rid themselves 
of that peculiar animus of opposition which is now a 
grievance to all progressive men. 

But, happily, this is a declining brotherhood. The 
majority of our schoolmasters are men of good abilities 
and attainments, faithful and reasonably open to the 
world in which they live. They are doing more and 
better work than any previous class of masters this 
country has known. It may seem ungracious to sum- 
mon them to the unwelcome task of stirring up the 
people to the dangers besetting the New Education ; 
explaining the improved methods ; defending the best 
things in the present system, and watching every op- 
portunity to exert a legitimate influence on public opin- 
ion. If we emphasize this call, it is in the interest of 
the public, whose servants they are, — the children to 
whom their lives are dedicated, and themselves, whose 
finest work is always in peril from the antagonistic 
forces of superstition, indifference, and the brute hos- 
tility of ignorance and avarice. 

The press is now open to the discussion of school- 
affairs as never before. It would not require an undue 
amount or a disreputable sort of " wire-pulling," in any 
American city or village, for the superior masters to 
obtain a hearing for the New Education. Such efforts 
have resulted in a permanent department of education 
in influential journals, conducted by superior teachers. 
The amount of gross and mischievous misrepresenta^ 
tion of school-affairs, in celebrated journals, is a matter 
of constant amazement. The masters should watch the 



THE SCHOOLMASTEB AND THE PEOPLE. 49 

press, correct misapprehension, expose misstatements, 
and keep the people informed concerning the most vital 
interest of the State. We commend to the school- 
masters of Boston an article in the Sunday Herald of 
February 2d, 1879, — thoroughly misleading and conspic- 
uous for lack of correct information. A year of such mis- 
chievous misrepresentation would wake up the Boston 
mob at both ends of the social scale to an organized 
crusade against the schools. The fact that so much of 
this needful work is already done by the masters, is an 
answer to the plea of pre-occupation. Good work is 
now being done ; but, in every battle, it is the " little 
more grape " that routs the enemy. 

The masters and superintendents should try to put 
themselves in more vital communication with the peo- 
ple, for the illustration and explanation of their work. 
True, the public' schools are always open to visitation ; 
but the people who ought to visit them are occupied in 
school hours. An occasional evening lecture, with 
classes to illustrate the new methods of teaching, would 
draw the parents, however preoccupied. Every country- 
district school-house should be open for winter-evening 
meetings, led by the teacher, for discussion and the 
instruction of the people. Occasions for the social in- 
tercourse of teachers and parents in cities should be 
made by the masters. What would become of any other 
class of public men who met their constituents so sel- 
dom as the schoolmaster ? There is no necessity for 
this stagnation of popular interest around the school- 
house. 

The masters of our cities can greatly help the country 
schools. It is possible for them to establish a vital co- 
operation; to occasionally visit different localities; to 
make their influence felt at the State House ; to become 



50 THE SCHOOLMASTER AND THE PEOPLE. 

a power, recognized and feared by every foe of the 
schools. The welfare of Boston, Providence, Hartford, 
New Haven, Portland, Concord, and Burlington, is 
bound up with the most remote township of New Eng- 
land ; and the wretched school-keeping and painful in- 
difference to its wretchedness, in whole regions of New 
England, is a reproach to the able men who preside 
over the highly-organized schools of those cities. 

We believe our best teachers, — men and women, — 
only need to be told that the people are waiting to hear 
from them, in this way, to respond. We assure them 
the people expect them to come to the front, and give a 
reason for their faith and works in the school-room. 



" TEN GBEAT GALS." . 51 



"TEN GREAT GALS." 

At the age of sixteen, before we had shed our "round- 
about," we contracted to " keep school " in district No. 
5 for $12.00 per month, and "boarding round." We 
knew very well the little red schoolhouse standing at 
the exact center of the district, on the borders of a 
mighty swamp, the farmhouses scattered about the 
hills. And we also knew the chronic nuisance of that 
particular school ; a squad of half-a-dozen rough fellows 
who had emerged into " tail coats," and would hardly 
relish the discipline of a boy pedagogue in a roundabout. 
After the first flush of elation at our election, the chill- 
ing reflection came back, like a return-wave of ice-water, 
that, in all human probability, ere our seventeenth 
birthday should dawn, we should be seen vanishing, 
head foremost, out of the schoolhouse window into a big 
snow-drift, propelled by class No. 1 of big boys. 

In our anxiety we applied to " Aunt Anna," the gen- 
eral oracle of the household. Aunt Anna was a stal- 
wart maiden of sixty summers, gigantic in proportions, 
but every inch a lady in her dear, old heart. She had 
nursed half the children in town through the measles, 
mumps, and chicken-pox, and was the main stay in all 
family emergencies. There were sly rumors that the 
occasional attack of "the fidgets," which overcame the 
good old lady at night, had some relation to a mysterious 
black bottle which she always carried in her work-bag ; 
but Aunt Anna, plus " the fidgets," was worth a regi- 
ment of ordinary feminines for all the home-made uses 
of country life. 

"Well, now, you are really going to keep school in 
district No. 5," said Aunt Anna, smoothing down her 



52 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

big-checked apron, and raising her spectacles for a good 
long look at the incipient pedagogue, seated at the op- 
posite corner of the fire-place. "Yes, Aunt Anna, I 
have promised to keep that school; but, between you 
and me, I am dreadfully afraid to tackle that crowd of 
big boys. You know what a rough set they are, and 
one of them has already ' given out ' that there will be 
no board wanted in district No. 5 after the first week." 
"That's a serious matter; now, let's see if we can't 
think of something to help you. Now, you see I don't 
kuow anything about book-larnin'. No doubt you can 
cipher that back seat of boys into the middle of next 
week. But they can fling you over the roof of the 
schoolhouse in a jiffy, if they have a mind to. I know 
every family in that district. I've nussed in every 
house, and taken the measure of every youngster that 
will come to that school. There's one thing in your 
favor ; there'll be ten great gals in that school, and most 
of 'em are good gals, too. Now, some of them gals are 
a head taller than you, and two or three of them are 
right handsome, too. They can twist that crowd of 
great bashful boys round their little finger if they want 
to. Now, mind what I tell you; do you go right to 
work and gain the affections of them ten great gals, and 
they'll manage the great boys, while you keep the school: '' 

That sounded well; and, armed with this panacea 
against rebellion, we opened school the Monday after 
Thanksgiving. It was a rough-looking set up on the 
high seats, — that row of villainous-looking fellows, either 
of them big enough to throw us over into the big swamp 
with one hand ! Happily, our first boarding-place was 
the home of two of the " great gals." Never did we 
" lay ourselves out " to gain the good graces of the 
lovely sex as during the first week of that boarding 

und. We rode on the front seat of the sled with the 



" TEN GEE AT GALS." 53 

tallest girl ; played checkers with the second ; got all 
snarled up in a "cat's cradle " with a pretty visiting 
cousin; and put in a word of explanation for the "hard 
sums " of all in the long evening at home. 

The first crisis came at the beginning of the second 
week, when a big lout " sauced " the new school- 
master. Somehow, it crushed us, and for a minute the 
schoolroom swam round, and the idea of seizing our 
fur-cap and making for home flitted, across our vision. 
Just then the patter of a light footstep was heard down 
the long slope of the narrow aisle leading up to the 
seat of the " ten great gals." The tallest glided down, 
ostensibly to ask an explanation of a hard sum ; but, as 
we leaned over the slate with a dimness in the eyes, we 
heard a low whisper in our ear: ll DonH be east down ; 
we girls ivill shame that seat of boys into good manners 
before another week." A light broke in; we were 
" gaining the affections of the ten great gals." 

So things drifted for six weeks, when dawned the 
judgment-day. We had gone to board with a good, 
motherly woman, who loved us as her own son. A big 
fire in the parlor greeted our arrival, and a supper fit 
for the parson himself. After tea our hostess appeared 
in her best black silk, in her hand a mighty oak " ruler," 
and sat down before us with the air of a Minerva : 
" Now, matters are coming to a point in your school ; 
you have been trying to govern that crowd of rascally 
boys by love, but that has come to an end. To-morrow 
they'll try to put you out. Take this ruler, and don't 
come home to me to-morrow night unless you've used it 
up over the head and shoulders of somebody." There 
was no appeal from that. A greater than the whole 
class of "great gals" had spoken, and we felt in our 
soul that fate was standing at the schoolhouse door. 



54 TALKS WITH TEACEERS. 

Were we endowed with the epic rage of a Homer or a 
Pope, We might possibly depict the scenes of the com- 
ing day. How the ugliest loafer in a frock-coat kicked 
in the door at recess ; how, when the trembling young 
master asked " Who had done that," the big boor 
lifted his thumb to his nose and executed that signifi- 
cant gyration with the little finger which would make a 
savage of St. John himself ; how, fired with the cour- 
age of despair and a vision of our farm-house Minerva, 
we siezed the big oak ruler, rushed up the inclined 
plane, upsetting several small children on the way, 
plunged at the throat of the insolent scoundrel, tore off 
the collar of his frock-coat, snaked him down to the area 
before the fire-place, and beat him over the head and 
shoulders till he roared for mercy ; how, at intervals, 
we cast a glance up at his accomplices and took in the 
situation, the " ten great gals " had spiked the guns of 
all but this wretch, who slunk and begged under our 
hands; how we wound up with an eloquent address, and 
gave the whipped ruffian his hat with instructions to go 
home ; how his sensible father took off what remained 
of his dilapidated frock-coat and trounced him till he 
yelled again, and sent him to school the following day 
with a compliment to the plucky young master ; all 
this might be sung in heroic verse. 

But, if the truth were known, it was not we, but the 
" ten great gals," that did the business. They had so 
demoralized the attacking column by the magic of their 
charms, that only one had the heart to defy the little 
master, and he dared not lift his hand when the day of 
battle came. And from that day we crowned dear, old 
Aunt Anna prophetess of love. Gain the affections of 
the " ten great gals " in your schoolroom, " and all things 
shall work together for good." 



THE MOTHER - TONGUE IN THE SCHOOLS. 55 



THE MOTHER - TONGUE IN THE SCHOOLS. 

The English language can be dealt with in two ways 
in common schools, as a family horse can be used by a 
household. An incipient sawbones in the family may 
persuade the old gentleman to turn over the household 
Dobbin to him for dissection. He may be slain, stretched 
on the table, opened up to the minutest muscle, and 
finally set to adorn the great hall as a beautiful "prep- 
aration." Or, the majority of the children may over- 
rule the zeal of the big scientific brother, and Dobbin 
may be reserved for human uses; to go to mill and to 
meeting; to plough out the corn; carry little Susie on 
her first. ride; and, on a leisure day, draw the whole 
family up to the nearest hill-top, where the loveliness of 
the valley of the Connecticut, or the grandeur of Mt. 
Washington, may calm and elevate the jaded soul. 

In the famous district school of the fathers, now so 
exalted by grave doctors and genial writers of romance, 
the mother-tongue was served up in the former style. 
The fearful exercise called ' parsing , in that ancient 
university of the people, was as complete an arrange- 
ment for cutting the throat, dissecting the form, and 
varnishing the remains of the language, as the wit of 
an old-fashioned pedagogue could devise. We parsed 
Paradise Lost without the remotest idea that it was 
anything but an exercise in English grammar. Years 
afterward, one rainy day, we fell upon Channing's Essay 
on Milton, and for the first time woke up to the fact 
that Paradise Lost is one of the world's epic poems. 
The ' analysis ' that succeeded the ' parsing ' of that re- 



56 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

mote day was only a more elaborate expedient of the 
same sort. With no previous acquaintance with liter- 
ature, or the higher and human uses of the mother- 
tongue, the high-school hoys and girls were shot into 
the jungle of " subject" and "predicate," drilled in all 
the highways and by-ways of verbal relations, till the 
dear old language lay on the floor of the schoolroom, 
dead as Csesar's body on the pavement of the Capitol, 
rent with ghastly stabs. 

Until a very late day, our young people owed all their 
practical knowledge of their native tongue to a taste for 
reading and writing, acquired after the close of their 
school years. The instruction in grammar, rhetoric, 
and composition, sent them forth with a deep-seated 
hatred of everything connected with these hateful names. 

The greatest single advance in school-life within the 
past twenty years, has been the waking-up of teachers 
to the fact that the English language should be taught 
in common schools for its common, human uses ; to en- 
able the people of the United States to speak and ivrite 
their native tongue with ease, precision, conciseness, and 
as much elegance as may be ; to arouse a love for the 
best literature, and direct in the best way to read good 
books. It is not too much to say that a child sent forth 
from a public school at the age of twelve, unable to 
speak and write his native tongue with a fair degree of 
ability, and destitute of a healthy taste for reading 
good books, has been badly trained, and has failed in a 
most important element of his education. Grammar, 
rhetoric, analysis, composition, should be taught for the 
sake of the English language, not the English language 
for their sake. The common school is not a university 
to work up a crowd of small philological experts, but a 
people's school to train the children in the master-art 






THE MOTHER- TONGUE IN THE SCHOOLS. 57 

of using their mother-tongue to express the best that is 
in them, and to open their eyes to the treasures of wis- 
dom hidden in books. Every American citizen, how- 
ever humble, from the experience of life has gathered 
up a good deal that is valuable for his fellow-men. The 
common school should give him the ability to set that 
forth by speech and pen in a way to make it accessible 
to his neighbors. Every citizen has leisure sufficient 
to read many good books, provided he knows how and 
where to read ; and the common school should place 
him on the threshold of the library of the world. 

The first aim of the teacher should be to help the 
child speak the mother-tongue with ease and propriety. 
And what an opportunity is afforded in every lesson 
through the entire school life of the pupil ! Do our 
teachers sufficiently reflect that for six, often for ten, 
sometimes for fifteen years, the children are placed 
where they are absolutely forbidden to speak except by 
their direction ? Every word is supposed to be an 
answer to a direct question, and is to be spoken with the 
sole purpose of conveying precise information on some 
well-defined point. If every teacher would insist on a 
clear, precise, complete answer to every question in the 
recitation-room, our children would learn the great art 
of expression better than by any method of special in- 
struction. It is because teachers are often so careless 
in their own speech, and tolerate such blundering in 
the reply of the pupil, that the majority of the students 
in all schools and colleges go forth unable to rise to 
their feet with ease and naturalness, and tell what they 
know upon the simplest theme in a way that commands 
attention and respect. Here, in the daily routine of 
school life, is the great opportunity for teaching the art 
of correct and elegant expression. 

E 



58 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

DeQuincy says that the best writing of English is in 
the correspondence of the educated women of England. 
If so, there must be some special method of training in 
written style in European schools not yet acquired even 
in our best public and private seminaries. A famous 
American historian told us he absolutely forbade the 
teachers of his children assigning an exercise in com- 
position in the regulation way. Indeed, the ordinary 
way in which subjects of composition are arranged in 
high schools and academies is certain death to all orig- 
inality or life in writing. A child well instructed in a 
primary school can write with ease on a topic which 
fills its heart and mind, and Shakespeare can write well 
on no other. The art of training the child to good 
writing is to know its character and abilities, and watch 
its enthusiasms so carefully that it can be piloted into 
the great central current of its better life, and set down 
cheerfully to express itself by the pen concerning the 
themes that press for utterance. To send out a child 
from the grammar or the high school with a horror of 
the name of composition, and a dread even of ordinary 
letter-writing, is one of the most glaring abuses of the 
teacher's office. 

And we do not realize that the chief use of books that 
will be made by the graduates of our schools is for. 
reading. Study in school is only the gymnastic to ac- 
quire the art of reading books with the least expendi- 
ture of time and mental strength. The lawyer, the 
doctor, the minister, read books on their several profes- 
sions. And the man of the world needs, above all 
things, the taste for the best reading, and the ability to 
appropriate the contents of the journal, the magazine, 
and the book, in the most expeditious and exhaustive 
way. The best thing in our new high-school work is 



THE MOTHER -TONGUE IN THE SCHOOLS. 59 

the revival of interest in English literature. In him 
dreds of our best high and grammar schools to-day 
children are being put in connection with the best lit- 
erature in a way that will be a blessing to their lives, 
and a benediction to the State. At every stage of the 
school-life, from the first entrance in the primary, to 
the graduation-day of the high school, the pwpil should 
be introduced to good books appropriate to its age and 
capacity. Then the life in the schoolroom will become 
the opening into the larger life of general culture from 
reading, which will lift the people out of their material- 
istic and professional ruts, into the higher realm of 
manhood and womanhood and intelligent citizenship of 
the United States. 



60 TALKS WITH TEACHEES. 



"IN LOCO PARENTIS." 

The courts have again and again decided that the 
teacher in the common schools of America, during the 
hours of school, stands in place of the parent ; and, like 
the parent, is responsible to the law of the State. An 
enlightened and christianized public opinion endorses 
the ruling of the judges, and upholds the schoolmaster 
and schoolmistress in the exercise of all authority need- 
ful to the proper work of instruction and discipline. 
It is a great testimonial to the justice and firmness of 
the American people that any attempt to trample down 
this rightful rule of the schoolroom by the brute vio- 
lence of the street, or to undermine it by the intrigues 
of the priest or the politician, have been so often 
thwarted. In almost every schoolhouse, the least school- 
master of competent ability feels himself leaning back 
against the people of the United States. 

But this relation of the teacher to the children is not 
a mere reproduction of the home-rule. It is a special 
relation, granted by the State for a specific object, — 
the education and discipline of the child for the life of 
the citizen. In some ways it is a broader relation than 
it is possible for any but the most enlightened and vir- 
tuous parents to sustain in the home. Not one mother 
in a thousand is yet able to lift herself above the nar- 
rowness of her own family, clique, or locality, and train 
her daughter into the politeness of the old gospel, 
"honor all men." How many a father, even of the 
" better class" of the foremost city of the land, is up to 
the discipline that turns out a son ready to 'love his 



" IN LOCO PARENTIS." 61 

neighbor as himself.' Who of us that are parents have 
the high courage and self-sacrifice to insist on the en- 
forcement upon our own offspring, of those immutable 
laws of mental and moral growth that go on their re- 
lentless way in sublime indifference to our weakness or 
our self-conceit ? Now here is the special realm of the 
teacher, — to be to the child the sort of parent demanded 
by the State ; to represent to it the unswerving de- 
mands of the spiritual realm, where knowledge, beauty, 
and love abide ; to lift it out of home-ruts up to the 
high table-land of the common weal, where it may over- 
look the mighty toils of citizenship before it is launched 
on the troubled ocean of American life. 

What, then, shall we say of the assembled wis- 
dom of the town meeting, of the gathered dignity of 
the city council that deliberately places in loco paren- 
tis a body of men and women chosen for their willing- 
ness to work cheap in obedience to some maggot of 
" economy " that has turned the popular head ? Let 
any unprejudiced, right-minded, intelligent man go 
through the country towns of the Northern States, in 
their season of spring "town meeting," not sparing a 
visit to the common council of the average American 
city, and study the temper of a large party therein when 
the appropriation for schools is in question. The great 
expenditure in these schools is for the wages of teach- 
ers ; to hire young women of sufficient ability, social 
experience, and breadth of character, to take half a hun- 
dred little ones from the narrowness of their homes, 
and give them to the State with fit preparation for 
its imperious demands. But, this year, the journals 
come to us loaded with the sickening intelligence of a new 
raid upon the already paltry salaries of these teachers. 
Old towns of honorable memory seem to be only in- 



62 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

flamed by the benevolence of public-spirited men, to 
withold the appropriations that alone can make such 
charity effective. If there could be a first-rate patent 
motive-power for driving down a township into perma- 
nent obscurity, making it a place hateful to all aspir- 
ing youth ; and shunned by all superior people, we could 
suggest nothing so complete as the screw of econ- 
omy, now turned harder every year on the schools by 
scores of towns between Boston and St. Louis. These 
townships resound with regrets of the departure of the 
" good old days" ; with imprecations on the neglect and 
want of appreciation of their rights in public affairs. 
The plain truth is, they permit themselves to be led by 
a little knot of selfish men of "property and standing," 
or by the rantings of a town-meeting demagogue, and 
leader of the "laboring classes," to this yearty hari-kari. 
Their lessening influence, and declining prosperity, and 
social deadness, and religious "coldness," are only the 
inevitable outcome of this wretched parsimony in that 
realm of life where all classes have a common interest ; 
the superior education and discipline of children for the 
duties of life. 

It is in the face of this public obliquity, often reen- 
forced by a most offensive private neglect or captious 
criticism, that the schoolmistress is often called to serve 
her country. She may be the butt of the small school 
" reformers " who grind down her salary to starvation 
rates. She may be left on the other side by the selfish 
and vulgar " shoddy aristocracy " of the village. She 
may be in the pillory of the malicious and petty gossip 
that often makes the life of the faithful teacher a mar- 
tyrdom. But of one thing nobody can deprive her. 
While she holds the office of teacher to that group of 
little ones, she holds a divine commission, countersigned 



"IN LOCO PARENTIS." 63 

by the State, to stand in the place of their faithless 
parents. Nobody can prevent her from educating these 
children above the pettiness, ignorance, and vulgarity 
of their homes. Nobody can stay her hand from mak- 
ing of these boys nobler, and wiser, and more patriotic 
men than the " fathers " who doom her to slave for a 
pittance in the hardest post of service in the town. She 
has her blessed reward in returning good for evil ; in 
the love of the little boys and girls, yet too young to 
know the injustice which she endures ; still open to the 
lessons of wisdom and virtue that will make such a pol- 
icy impossible in the generations to come. It is this 
which holds up so many of our noblest men and women 
to their thankless task in the school-room ; that makes . 
these bare and narrow places a temple for a lofty ser- 
vice ; that conquers respect, and, in due time, touches the 
public conscience, always slow to awaken, but sure to 
do justice in the end. And it is this sense of a spiritual 
maternity of the dear little ones, a voluntary assumption 
of the most sacred and tender relation possible for wo- 
man, that consoles the heart of many a schoolmistress, 
who toils on, unsought in marriage, wearing out her 
youthful beauty and vigor, but all the time gaining in 
that higher grace which marks her as God's messenger 
to the people. Verily, it is worth living for, working 
on the stingiest pittance, to be placed thus, by the Com- 
monwealth and a good Providence, in loco 'parentis to 
the children who will make the republic that is to be. 



64 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



THE OTHER -WISE MEN OF THE EAST. 

The good, steady-going voters of the State of Maine 
woke up one morning last autumn to the conviction that 
the Pine-tree Commonwealth had passed into the hands of 
a new set of political wise-men. The party of " labor and 
reform " had reinforced one of the regulation contend- 
ing parties, and wrested the power from the hands of 
the organization that had come to reckon on the State 
as a perpetual preserve. The fact that a township or a 
Commonwealth changes political front, especially from 
the reinforcement of one party by a body of citizens bent 
on some useful reform, is not alarming; rather an omen 
of better things. Nobody but a chronic partisan denies 
that there is a great deal to be said in behalf of the 
movement touching the elevation of large classes of 
workmen, even in the United States, — where the laborer, 
politically, is a ruler in a sense that the nobleman of 
old Europe might envy. This was also the first sub- 
stantial victory gained by a combination that claims to 
be the coming power in national politics ; and here was 
an excellent field to make an honorable record in all 
that tells upon the real elevation of the laboring classes 
in the whole country. 

Unfortunately, this hope of better things was blight- 
ed, almost in advance. The first demand that seemed 
to come up from this new combination for " reform," 
was a loud and sweeping clamor for a complete revolu- 
tion of the school system of the State. The better sort 
of school-men of Maine have been working for the last 
twenty years, under great embarrassments, but with ex- 



THE OTHER -WISE MEN OF THE EAST. 65 

cellent effect. They have led New England in the 
achievement of a State tax for education. They have 
maintained a creditable, and latterly an exceedingly 
able State supervision of schools. Their two normal 
schools have done valuable work, though always with 
the draw-back of a half-hearted support from the legis- 
lature, and the ill-concealed jealousy of great sectarian 
academies. But the one act which could be regarded 
as the especial triumph of the working-man, was the re- 
cent high-school law, whereby every town, on raising by 
home taxation a moderate sum, could receive State aid 
in the establishment of a high school. Under this 
beneficent statute a great number of schools, of a higher 
than the average district or grammar grade, have been 
founded in the State within the past few years ; offering 
to the child of the humblest laborer the outlook for a 
superior education. Of course this movement in the in- 
terest of the whole people had been opposed, as in all 
the States, by the sectarian and private corporate ac- 
ademical interests, and the regulation crowd of high- 
joint opponents of everything that proposes to " educate 
the lower classes above their sphere in life." But it 
was to be expected that a party that had swept a great 
Commonwealth in a political revolution, in the interest 
of the working-man, should hold fast to this as a point 
well made, and fit to be stuck to at all hazards. 

But this new party has unhappily failed when brought 
to the most vital of all judgment-seats in a free republic. 
There is one set of men in this country who always and 
everywhere can be trusted to drive at the throat of the 
people's common school. By whatever name in politics, 
or creed in religion, or position in society, he may be 
superficially designated, the radical animus of that sort 
of man is hatred to anything but the most meagre and 



QQ TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

stinted education of the masses at public expense. This 
class exists in every community, though only in occa- 
sional and half-accidental emergencies does it come into 
possession of the reins of power. Where it cannot de- 
stroy, it cripples ; reducing the school to inefficiency by 
short allowance j and does its best to make the office of 
teacher intolerable by overwork, and contemptible by 
reduction of salary. 

The new party chose to endorse this unpatriotic and 
essentially aristocratic policy. The Governor followed 
hard in the rural track of Governor Robinson of New 
York, in a general onslaught upon the whole system of 
free higher instruction, denouncing the high-school law, 
the normal schools, the Agricultural College, and pro- 
posing the wholesale reduction of the school expenditure 
of the State as a means of economy. The leaders of 
the new party made early declaration of their intentions 
in this direction, and set at work with a good will to 
reduce Maine to the condition of a third-class State, and 
force her, for the next half-century, to take the back seat. 

HajDpily no State, old or new, north of Mason's and 
Dixon's line, is prepared for this sort of reform back- 
wards into barbarism. The agitators for ignorance in 
the State House at Augusta soon found themselves con- 
fronted by a spirit that made itself evident, even to 
their stolid apprehensions. It was soon apparent that 
destruction would not be tolerated, and the question re- 
solved itself into one of animus. Not able to sweep 
away the new high-school system, the majority of the 
Legislature voted to suspend the operation of the law a 
year. Failing to carry the point of abolition of the 
normal schools, they have contented themselves with 
giving them an ugly kick, cutting down their allow- 
ance, and generally casting indignity upon them. The 



THE OTHEB-WISE MEN OF THE EAST. 67 

Agricultural College is left to get on as it can upon its 
own resources. The rate of State taxation for educa- 
tion is reduced. Having done enough to make itself 
contemptible in the eyes of every workingman of com- 
mon-sense in the Commonwealth, this sham laboring- 
man's legislation adjourned and disappeared among its 
native backwoods, leaving to tlie people the task of 
righting the wrong and repairing the mischief at a new 
deal of votes another autumn. 

The good people of this growing Commonwealth now 
understand that the eyes of the better sort of the Amer- 
ican people, of all classes, are fixed on the East. One 
year more of such legislation in the interest of low-down 
vulgarity, sectarian ambition, and high-joint contempt 
for the masses, will hopelessly cripple their excellent 
system of public education, built up with so much de- 
votion. We look for a reaction in Maine in behalf of 
the real interests of labor, reform, and decency, that 
will teach all parties a useful lesson. For there is one 
fact that the politicians and the priests may as well un- 
derstand to-day as to-morrow : Any political party, or 
any denomination of religionists, that attempts to build 
itself up by pulling doivn the American system of free 
schools, or by destroying any vital branch of it, ivlll go ' 
doivn to the Hades where the old slave aristocracy noiv 
slumbers its eternal sleep. A great many good, and a 
larger number of the other sort of people in the United 
States, don't understand this fact. The State of Maine 
has now an excellent opportunity to impress that rad- 
ical principle of American policy on the consciousness 
of the average sectarian priest and partisan politician, 
in a way that it will remain for the next half-century. 

If the laboring class of that great State understand 
their interest, and have a concern for the future of their 



68 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

children, they will have a speedy settlement with the 
demagogues who, in their name, have taken the bread of 
knowledge out of the mouths of their offspring. Possi- 
bly the considerable class of sectarian clergy and pri- 
vate-academy trustees, who have been nagging the high 
and normal schools the last four years, may not feel in- 
spired by the educational company they now find them- 
selves in. There will be an excellent opportunity for 
some of the statesmen, relieved from duty at Washing- 
ton by the late overturn, to stump the State in the in- 
terest of that general education and popular intelli- 
gence, without which liberty is only a sham. And if 
others of the great men of Maine could take a vacation 
from their continental posturing for the Presidency, 
'and put in a few lively gestures and " burning" periods 
in behalf of the country schoolmistresses and the hard- 
worked and poorly-paid men who hold up the higher 
stories of the ark, it might not come amiss. We look 
for a good report next autumn ; a reform of " the re- 
formers," which will place the Pine-tree State once 
more among the foremost in all things that concern the 
true welfare of the whole people. 



SCHOOL SUPERVISION IN NEW ENGLAND. 69 



SCHOOL SUPERVISION IN NEW ENGLAND. 

No. II. 

The progress of efficient school supervision in New 
England is a curious commentary on the characteristics 
of that most obstinate people, the Yankees. It is only 
within the last twenty-five years that anything like the 
present system of city superintendency has been toler- 
ated in the largest cities of the Eastern States. Even 
Hartford, Conn., to-day glories in a loyal adherence to 
her ancient " district " system, and regards herself as 
" insured " against the peril of superintendency. Bos- 
ton has never known school superintendence in the 
sense that Cleveland and St. Louis understand that term. 
The city superintendent in our Athens is a gentleman 
who maintains a general oversight of the system ; 
writes a semi-annual report of " suggestions " ; escorts 
distinguished strangers through the educational para- 
dise of which he is the major-domo ; and wields all the 
power his personal skill as a politician and persuader of 
school committee, supervisors, and masters can achieve. 
Several of our largest New-England cities have a super- 
intendency only in name. A few secondary cities, 
like Springfield, Worcester, and New Bedford, are the 
only places in New England where the true idea of a 
superintendent who represents the school committee to 
the teachers and pupils is apprehended and carried into 
effect. Our New-England towns and villages of 5,000 
to 10,000 people suffer greatly from the lack of a thor- 
ough handling of the schools. They vibrate between a 
fit of vigorous superintendency and a revolution of the 
" masses/' which either abolishes the office or places one 



70 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

member of the school committee in a sort of quasi-super- 
visory position. 

There can be no doubt to an intelligent observer that 
the present state of supervision in the cities and large 
villages in New England is a serious drawback to the 
efficiency of the schools and the economy of their ad- 
ministration. In Boston the old reign of the masters 
has been followed by the triumvirate of masters, super- 
visors, and superintendent, to the injury of all con- 
cerned and the confusion of the people. Boston is a 
city of great wealth, and can well afford to pay as much 
money as at present for popular education. But a large 
per cent, of that expenditure is a tax imposed upon the 
people to gratify the whim of " individuality " among 
its school-men. No crotchet in school-keeping is so 
expensive as the chronic mania of the New-England 
high-toned schoolmaster to be responsible to nobody 
this side of Omniscience. It places the children of each 
school precinct, and, through them, the majority of 
the least-informed parents, greatly in the power of a 
man who, by virtue of long occupation, skill in manipu- 
lating school-district politics, or some element of special 
superiority, is master of the situation. Such a teacher 
often holds on for years, resolutely defying the school 
committee which he has engineered into office, resisting 
the new education, inspiring distrust of normal schools, 
and through the despotic ruling of his subordinates, 
perpetuating his own antiquated and inefficient style of 
operation. Thus, while the people of our New England 
cities and large towns imagine themselves " free as air " 
in the management of their schools, and do indulge in 
an extraordinary amount of small interference, grum- 
bling, and embarrassing " economical " experimenting, 
there is no part of America where so many children are 



SCHOOL SUPERVISION IN NEW ENGLAND. 71 

virtually in the hands of ohstinate masters, wedded to 
ancient methods, — their hearts fully set within them 
not to be superintended or baffled in any way in their 
favorite notions of training the youthful mind. 

As a result our New-England school-keeping has not 
yet reaped the full result of the large infusion of edu- 
cated and trained women into the corps of instruction. 
Our State normal and. city training-schools, excellent 
high schools, and famous academies are sending out the 
best material in the country for women-teachers. But 
the ordinary normal graduate in the larger places too 
often falls into the hands of a schoolmaster whose ideal 
of his vocation is to "mould" his "lady assistant.' 
This moulding process, in too many cases, includes the 
persistent effort to baffle and confuse the ideas of peda- 
gogics she has received at her normal school ; to make 
her the cog in the graded wheel of which he turns the 
crank, and bring her into final subjection to his ideas. 
If the sapient legislators who are engaged in the lofty 
enterprise of starving out the normal schools of New 
England could appreciate the fact that what they call a 
"public opinion" against normal graduates, is generally 
only the opinion of an unsympathetic schoolmaster, 
magnified to an appalling specter by the clever manage- 
ment of a pedagogical stereopticon, they might pause in 
their destructive raid upon the most reliable agency 
of our school system. We have no disposition to under- 
rate the culture, the devotion, and the ability of the 
school teachers of New England. But in no class of 
professional people in the New-England States does the 
old sense of a personal right to administer irresponsible 
power, once assumed by the clergy, so obstinately hold 
on. And to say this power is often used to the injury 
of the schools, the hindrance of new and improved 



72 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

methods of education, and the baffling of true economy 
in school expenditure, is only to assert what is evident 
to the vast majority of the non-professional educational 
class in these States. 

The cure for many of the evils that still afflict our 
city and village schools of New England, is thorough 
supervision and superintendency. In most of our cities 
a first-class superintendent, armed with full executive 
powers, responsible only to the school committee, a man 
or woman of large experience, open mind, sympathy 
with the best elements of the new education, — in the 
best sense a public man or woman, and a leader in soci- 
ety, — can do his work. Such a superintendency cannot 
be obtained without a competent salary, and the chronic 
habit of our smaller cities of starving out a good super- 
intendent as soon as his services are really valuable, and 
calling in a cheap- jack who will work for the wages of 
a bookkeeper, has wrought untold loss in the efficiency 
of the schools. The best possible economy in a town of 
10,000 to 30,000 people is to choose a school committee 
of moderate size and the best quality, and sustain it in 
putting the management of the schools greatly into the 
hands of a superintendent who is an expert in the best 
sense ; paying him the market value of his services. 
In many of our smaller cities and larger villages, the 
best person for this post will be found in a woman of 
long experience as a teacher, gifted with the energy and 
tact which are so conspicuous in a large class of our 
best women teachers of common schools. 

The actual saving in money that comes from the 
presence of an expert, by whom all the expensive proj- 
ects of teachers and outside reformers can be reviewed, 
and who is a watch-dog over the whole field of school 
economies, in most cases will pay the salary of the most 



SCHOOL SUPEBVISION IN NEW ENGLAND. 73 

accomplished official. But this is the least of the ad- 
vantages of effective superintendency. An executive 
officer of this character is always on the watch to detect 
rising merit in any teacher ; to distribute the force of 
instruction for the highest advantage of the pupils; to 
defend the young teachers against the petty tyranny of 
their superiors ; to represent the school committee to 
the parents, and be a wall of defence between the chil- 
dren and incompetent or unjust instructors ; to arrange 
courses of study and maintain the fit relations between 
all grades, especially the grammar and high schools, and 
see that no part of the system is crippled to give undue 
prominence to another. 

In short, the time is upon us when the cities and 
large villages of New England must revise their ideas 
of economic and effective school-keeping, demand the 
best for th,eir money, pay more liberally, and trust more 
generously, the best superintendency and supervision. 
We only repeat the growing conviction of the wisest 
school-men and careful observers, that in this direction 
is the chief opportunity for the improvement of our 
public schools. 



74 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



SCHOOL SUPERVISION IN NEW ENGLAND. 

No. II. 

The most vital question, just now, concerning the or- 
ganization of popular education in America is the su- 
pervision of country schools. By common consent the 
cities of the United States have adopted superintend- 
ency; the few exceptional cities really vesting supervi- 
sory power in superintendents call by different names. 
In some of the Middle, Western, and Southwestern 
States, the expedient of county or district supervision 
has been in operation for a considerable time. That it 
has been, on the whole, a great benefit, no weU-informed 
observer will dispute. That it has been sometimes 
abused, perverted, and even swamped by political parti- 
sanship and a low state of feeling about public educa- 
tion, nobody who knows will deny. Still, the weighty 
declaration of a body of men like the Convention at Col- 
umbus, Ohio, that such a system is absolutely essential to 
the reformation of the country schools of that State, 
must be conclusive. The failure of county superintend- 
ence has been the common misery of all good things 
that depend on the popular verdict for support. The 
thing aimed at, — to place our country district schools 
under a firm, intelligent, progressive supervision, — is 
still the crying need of popular education in America. 

It may not have been in vain that the people of New 
England have not, at once, followed this lead in the ex- 
periment of country supervision. Our friends beyond 
the Berkshire hills can hardly appreciate the peculiarity 



SCHOOL SUPEBVISION IN NEW ENGLAND. 75 

of New-England civilization ; the intense individualism 
that pervades its population of English descent and 
still dominates the rural districts, whose population is 
largely of English blood. Neither will it do to sneer at 
New-England school-keeping on the ground that it has 
not fallen into line with all the new methods that have 
been marked with such brilliant results in the great 
cities of our new Western Empire. While these new 
methods, under the powerful superintendency of a few 
able Western men, have produced wonderful results in 
certain localities, yet the recent experiences of a city 
like Chicago point to the weak spot in all Western 
school administration. In all new or rapidly-growing 
American communities, the mass of the people are too 
busy to watch anything so quiet and out of sight as a 
public school. The administration of public education 
falls into the hands of a few men, and unless some sharp 
issue of a semi-educational character is raised, remains 
in their hands. Thus while the popular attention is 
preoccupied, a style of supervision as despotic as the old- 
fashioned college faculty may prevail, and, if it be an 
intelligent supervision, work prodigious results with a 
power that astonishes the world. But one election-day 
in Chicago, Cincinnati, or St. Louis, may disturb the 
very foundations of the brilliant school systems of these 
cities, and precipitate them into a battle for existence in 
their present shape. This danger will beset all Ameri- 
can school-keeping until the great majority of the people 
are thoroughly converted to a faith in public education, 
and are sufficiently interested to keep watch of what is 
done with their children. 

We believe no portion of our country is so near this 
desirable state as the more vital parts of New England. 
In Massachusetts almost as a whole, largely in Connec- 



76 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

ticut, Rhode Island, and the more western portions of 
Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, the teacher is 
as thoroughly under the popular eye as the clergyman, 
the doctor, or the member of the Legislature. There 
have been exasperating controversies in many of our 
New England towns and cities concerning the econo- 
mies of public-school keeping during the past years of 
financial disaster. But the party that proposes to essen- 
tially change the system itself ; to destroy the high 
school ; to carry back the district school to the days of 
the fathers ; to seriously interfere with the graded sys- 
tem or oppose the introduction of reasonable improve- 
ments, is confined to a few stingy millionaires, a squad 
of conceited impracticables, and the self-appointed lead- 
ers of political workingmen's associations. There is as 
little probability that New England will permanently 
change her system of school-keeping, or set herself 
against the march of improvement in methods of 
instruction, as that she will become Catholic, or 
back down on a monarchial form of government. 

But, from this very reason, because so many people 
must be consulted to do anything, and because the ele- 
ment of individualism is so predominant in all public 
affairs, New England moves slowly in the direction of 
supervision of country schools. But the movement is 
sure, if slow. Just now, New England in her gradual, 
thorough way, is occupied in abolishing the old district 
system, in which the election of teachers, and general 
direction of instruction, is in the hands of local "pru- 
dential committees," elected by the people of one school 
district. This good work is almost completed in Massa- 
chusetts, and the schools of the townships placed under 
the control of a general school committee, chosen for 
three years by the vote of the town. Massachusetts 



SCHOOL SUPEBVISION IN NEW ENGLAND. 77 

and New Hampshire have just passed the law admitting 
woman suffrage in the choice of the school committee, 
and for several years women have served as members of 
the board. In many of our smaller townships, one 
member of the school committee is appointed to do the 
work of supervision and take the salary of the whole 
body. This is a decisive step forward. It will be taken 
by all the New England States, and within a few years 
every township will be placed under the superintendence 
of a committee chosen for several years by popular vote, 
entrusted with the sole power of administering the edu- 
cational interests of the community. 

In Massachusetts a step has been taken beyond this. 
The State Board of Education, a body consisting of nine 
members appointed by the Governor, elects a secretary, 
who is virtually State Superintendent of Education ; 
and a corps of agents who are constantly visiting the 
country schools, holding institutes, and in many ways 
seeking to improve the school-keeping of the rural dis- 
tricts. They work under many disadvantages : the 
absence of power to enforce anything j the condition of 
many of the old and drooping townships of the more re- 
tired portions of the Commonwealth, and the inevitable 
jealousies of the teachers and committees. Still, a great 
work is being done. Secretary Dickinson has inaugu- 
rated his administration by a systematic campaign for 
district supervision of country schools. The bill in- 
spired by him, which obtained a respectable vote in the 
Legislature of 1879, provided that the chairman of 
each township school committee should be the member 
of a district-board who should elect a district superin- 
tendent of schools. This superintendent should repre- 
sent the State as inspector, examiner of teachers, in the 
arrangement of courses of study, and should be ap- 



78 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

proved by the Board of Education before election. It 
may be that in the effort to avoid the danger of popular 
election of district superintendent and to respect the 
position of the township school committee, the plan of 
Secretary Dickinson is too elaborate and schoolmaster- 
ish for public approval. But we believe he has grasped 
the central difficulty of the country supervision, — the 
necessity to preserve in full vigor the local interest in, 
and responsibility for free education. This interest is 
represented by the township school committee, and any 
school that over-rides this body and removes the gov- 
erning power of the schools. from the direct influence of 
the people, will fail to commend itself to American in- 
stitutions and habits. But, on the contrary, if the State 
undertakes to support a system of instruction by gen- 
eral taxation, it has the right to insist on a fixed ele- 
ment of qualification in teachers, and an oversight of 
methods, as the condition of supplying its quota of ex- 
pense. In some way, possibly by the reconstruction of 
the Board of Education, and making each member an 
expert this good result will be attained. 

If the present dangerous and demoralizing rush of 
American-life to cities is to be arrested, it must be by the 
elevation of country life. It will be in vain for poets, 
preachers, or statesmen to call upon the youth of the 
United States to remain in the country and grow up 
amid the influences of agricultural pursuits, if the coun- 
try is to remain a century behind the city in vital ele- 
ments of modern civilization. The stingy, slow, coarse, 
materialistic type of agricultural life in vast districts of 
our country ; a life in which intolerable drudgery is va- 
ried only by a monotonous social visitation ; while cult- 
ure and refinement, elegance of living and superiority 
in anything but money-making, are the passport to a 



SCHOOL SUPEBVISION IN NEW ENGLAND. 79 

surly, low-lived jealousy; will never be willingly ac- 
cepted by the better sort of our young people and never 
ought to be. A cultivated family cannot be blamed for 
refusing to bring up its children in a village in New Eng- 
land or Ohio, where the schools tolerate the old, slow, 
stupid fumbling with the children of thirty years ago. 
A thorough system of supervision of country education, 
which will assure the people that their schools are han- 
dled by competent teachers and taught by the best 
methods, would call back to the country thousands of 
families who have now abandoned it, and greatly assist 
to lift this realm of life, as a whole, out of the ruts of 
drudgery, vulgarity, and obstinate ignorance and preju- 
dice. Instead of an assault to be repelled, this reform 
should be a movement from the heart of every country 
district to put itself in line with modern civilization. 



80 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



"THE CHILD GREW." 

One of the most serious drawbacks in the school-edu- 
cation of children is the fact that so many fond parents 
have a notion that their own special darling is exempt 
from the divine law of gradual growth into manhood 
or womanhood. They read in the good book that even 
the son of God was not excused from the slow, painful 
process of growth in " wisdom " as well as " stature," 
and "favor with God and man." But they fancy, 
somehow, that the Almighty Lawgiver has let off their 
John or Mary from the common lot of childish and 
youthful experience, and what was never yet done by 
anybody can be achieved, as a matter of course, by them. 

Every child, save their own, must grow in- ability to 
study, to digest knowledge and to reduce it to practical 
working force and character. The vast majority of 
children find this an exceedingly slow process. Indeed, 
some of the most famous people the world has ever seen, 
like Walter Scott and like Abraham Lincoln, found 
themselves at a pretty advanced age in the category of 
greenhorns. But this particular father does not see 
why his John, eight years of age, should not " drive 
business " in the primary school as he does in the count- 
ing-room, at the age of fifty. And this ambitious 
mother is in a chronic quarrel with teachers and school- 
committees because her girl does not sweep through the 
grades of the high school in the style that Mrs. Jones' 
Sally made a " ten strike " in society and landed herself 
in a brilliant engagement at the end of her first season. 

A large and noisy class of educational " reformers " 



" THE CHILD GBEW." 81 

are abusing our school systems as " rotten," " unpracti- 
cal," "visionary," because they do not turn out boys at 
fifteen fully equipped to launch themselves and re- 
lieve their parents from their support; or "sprout" the 
quality of independent judgment and self-sacrificing, 
persevering industry in girls at fourteen, which not one 
man or woman in a thousand ever acquires and few 
people learn, save as the result of a tussle of years with 
a rough world. 

But the most unhappy delusion in this class of people 
is that the schools do for their children only what 
is apparent in their minds and characters on gradua- 
tion day. Leaving out the element of parental fond- 
ness and the indestructible hopefulness with which the 
world persists in welcoming every new generation, 
the actual condition, — mental, moral, and spiritual, — of 
any set of children on graduation-day, at twelve or 
sixteen, is not especially encouraging. We find them 
limp, green, full of impracticable crotchets and conceits ; 
in danger of collision with the everlasting laws at every 
step ; too often with defects of character that fill us 
with apprehension for their near future. Why have 
not these " experts " in the school-room, with their new 
methods of instruction, — these palatial school-houses and 
big school-tax bills, — left a stronger impression on this 
crowd of youngsters ? It is " easy as preaching " to 
fling a bitter and satirical leader at the school system 
and authorities, the morning after such an exhibition ; 
especially if the writer is a man who has no children, 
or none that he is acquainted with, from his preoccu- 
pation in swinging the world every morning. The 
press and the drawing-room, to say nothing of the pul- 
pit, resound with the depreciation of all our schools for 
their inability to mould character and mind, and leave 

F 



82 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

their graduates finished examples of the transforming 
power of education. 

But if these critics could be permitted to follow these 
children out into actual life and mark how each succeeds, 
in a manner ; how some do attain in an eminent de- 
gree ;. how, gradually, often as slowly as the unfolding 
of the buds in a late spring, the results oi" the faithful 
work of teachers as well as parents appear; they might 
consent to spare us a little of their Olympic wrath and 
scorn. The fact is that the best results of all instruc- 
tion of children cannot be seen in childhood. By the 
very nature of the creature, the lower side of all instruc- 
tion first attracts the attention. It is the superficial, 
the material, the outward and sensational in school and 
teacher, that earliest makes its mark even on the best of 
pupils. The higher element of the lesson ; the upper 
side of the method of instruction ; the indescribable art 
that links the flying minutes of the recitation-hour into 
a poem or picture ; the hints and suggestions that only 
provoke inquiry in the superior scholars ; especially the 
moulding effects of a well-digested course of study or 
discipline, and the silent, unconscious teaching of a 
strong and lovely character in the master ; — these things 
cannot bear hasty fruit. It is things of this sort that, 
like the good seed in the parable, sown broadcast in a 
schoolroom, share the fate of all high things in this 
strange world, falling by the wayside, upon the rocks, in 
the shallow soil, in the good ground. And in proportion 
as this element in the school-life of children is effective, 
is it shy, circuitous, obscure, and provokingly inca- 
pable of being summed up in those pretentious tables 
of statistics which are the " valley of dry bones" in our 
civilization. All the higher influences, divine or hu- 
man, must have time to make their mark. And the best 



" THE CHILD GREW:' 83 

result of the first day's instruction in the primary school 
may he just rising on the horizon when the old man's 
eye lights up with the flush of his dawning immortality. 
How often is every thoughtful man made aware that 
his first real understanding of his own childhood and 
youth, his first valuable appreciation of his home, churchy 
school, — especially of his superior teachers, — comes with 
the experience of years ! How often, at some crossing 
of the roads, in a dreary section of his life's journey, a 
remembered word of advice, a look out of a face now 
twenty years under the sod, a struggle over a problem, 
or a tussle against a just chastisement in the old school- 
room, comes up like an angelic figure, guiding and 
strengthening ! So must it be with the higher meth- 
ods of our best new school-keeping. Because it is su- 
perior, must its higher outcome be waited for during 
the whole life of its subjects. The reckless people 
who, in the interest of a cheap economy or a hand-to- 
mouth theory of the practical, persist in harassing the 
schools aud keeping the best teachers always on the 
anxious seat, may be assured that it is their own im- 
patience, and not the advanced education of the time,, 
that is at fault. Keep at the child in the best way re- 
vealed to you, and the child will grow. 



84 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



WOMEN AT THE POLLS. 

As far as heard from, the registration of women voters 
for the school committee in Massachusetts goes on more 
actively in the country townships than in the cities. 
This is as it should he. For the last few years a con- 
siderable number of these townships have placed women 
on school committees. The women in all country dis- 
tricts are brought in closer connection with the little 
district schools and their teachers than is possible in 
the' cities. A very large proportion of the women in 
any respectable New-England township are of the better 
sort, accustomed to a general social and moral interest 
in the welfare of the community. They largely control 
the churches, direct the charities, and keep alive the in- 
terest in Temperance, Village Improvement, and the 
whole upper side of country life. 

It is certainly high time that a new influence of some 
kind should revise the school district in many of these 
little townships of New England. No one but a careful 
observer can estimate the damage to the schools from 
the heartless and stolid stinginess of hundreds of these 
boards of school committee-men, during the past five 
years. It is not too much to say that the entire class 
of superior teachers in these towns is in the market, 
biding its time to remove to more favored localities. A 
little knot of wealthy and influential people in league 
with the leaders of the lower sort of " labor reformers/ 7 
infuriated with the rage for township " economy," can 
easily suppress the average school committee, bulldoze 
the average town meeting into a destructive policy with 



WOMEN AT THE POLLS. 85 

the schools, and tear down, in a year, the best things 
achieved by many years of faithful administration. Wo 
believe the women of such townships will justify the 
new trust given them by the Commonwealth. They 
will improve the personelle of the school committees, in 
sist on more thorough and frequent visitation of the 
schools, expose the feebleness of incompetent teachers, 
and demand fair appropriations for education by the 
town meeting. And we shall be surprised if we do not 
witness a general brightening up in the structure, fur- 
nishings, and surroundings of the average country school- 
house from the same source. Spite of the great im- 
provements in the country schoolhouse during the past 
twenty years, it still remains far below a fair standard 
as a fit habitation for the people's children, especially 
through the long months of our desperate winter climate. 
Few respectable housewives in Massachusetts would 
consent to live, through any season, in a house so placed 
and so bare of all comforts and attractions as the dis- 
trict schoolhouse. We believe the exercise of the suf- 
frage will awaken a personal interest in this side of 
school life. The most important village and township 
improvement, at present, is the reconstruction of the 
schoolhouse, and the general civilizing and refining of 
the life therein. 

We also may hope for a decided advance in the teach- 
ing of morals and manners in our country schools from 
this source. For the past few years the partisan theo- 
logians and the "liberal leagues" have raised such a 
senseless din and dust of controversy about this vital 
interest of the schools that their teachers have, too often, 
been frightened into a sort of moral paralysis. If 
there is one fact evident, even in New England educa- 
tion, it is the absolute necessity of more vigorous and 



S6 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

better methods of character-training, especially in the 
country schools. The first condition of this improve- 
ment is the displacement of the large number of 
youthful, untrained, half-educated, characterless girls, 
who now flounder through the daily confusion of a six- 
hours' fumbling with a group of children, and the sub- 
stitution of women of mature character, and resolute 
moral purpose. For a wise, Christian, educated woman, 
an adept in the beautiful methods of the new education, 
backed by the superior women of an American country 
township, will find no difficulty in training her scholars 
in " good morals and gentle manners" ; spite of the 
sore corns of zealous ecclesiastics, or the fury of the 
ne\^ high priests of secularism. 

In the nineteen cities and fifty larger villages of 
the State, we apprehend the chief difficulty will be to 
persuade the majority of good and sensible women, who 
are now overworked and confused by the cares of our 
new social life, to take on even the slight added respon- 
sibility of voting for the school committee. In these 
cities and large towns the schools are more generously 
supported, far better housed and taught, and much 
more sensitive to public opinion through the whole 
range of administration, than in the country. It is un- 
fortunate that a class of violent, impracticable, and fussy 
ladies of culture and position who, for the last few years, 
have been pushing their vagaries on common school- 
keeping through the press, should in some instances 
have rushed to the front and called the women to a cru- 
sade in which they are to be the standard-bearers. The 
evils against which they declaim in our city graded 
schools, either exist chiefly in their own imagination, or 
are inseparable from republican institutions. The ani- 
mus of their reform is the effort to change the common 



> 



WOMEN AT THE POLLS. 87 

school of the whole people to a sort of training-semin- 
ary for the "industrial classes," where the sons and 
daughters of the mechanics and laborers of cities shall 
be fitted to take the places of their parents, content to 
plod on in the old European style of a meek submission 
to an inevitable lot in life. 

Of course this is only the dream of a small class, and 
least of all dreams liable to become a reality. But it is 
the duty of the great mass of sensible, Christian women 
'in our cities to go to the polls, next autumn, and vote 
for school officers who can be relied on, at least, not to 
wreck the schools we have, in a reckless experimenting 
in regions where the wisest instructors are most in doubt. 

We also need this great conserving force of our Jbest 
womanhood especially to neutralize the weight of the 
mass of ignorant women which ere long will be organ- 
ized, by political and ecclesiastical demagogues, in the 
attempt to break down the common-school system of 
Massachusetts. That system will remain, and gradu- 
ally adjust itself to the changing conditions of New- 
England life as long as the better elements of every 
community keep watch and ward over it. It will be a 
mighty comfort to the band of faithful men who have 
stood to their guns during the past few years, to be re- 
inforced by the army of noble women whose zeal and 
courage for the children have often held them up to a 
distasteful duty. And we have great hope that the act 
of voting will stimulate many a visionary lady, or hum- 
ble washerwoman, to visit the schools. More than half 
the opposition to our improved city school-keeping, 
among women, is the result of profound ignorance of 
what the schools really are, and the reliance on the gos- 
sip of school-children for the little, distorted information 
they do possess. A moderate acquaintance with the 



88 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

ideals and the actual achievements of our leading 
American educators would silence a great deal of bitter 
accusation, and enlist in the practical work of educa- 
tional reform large numbers of women /whose best ener- 
gies now run to waste. So, by all means, let the wo- 
men in country and city go to the polls in Massachu- 
setts, and in the fear of God and the wisest love for the 
children, cast their first vote. 



f 

THE S P1H IT OF TBE NEW EDUCATION. 89 



THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW EDUCATION. 

Eighteen centuries ago the Great Teacher of man- 
kind struck the key-note of a higher civilization when 
he said : " Except ye become as little children, ye cannot 
enter the kingdom of heaven.'''' Regarded only as a 
training-school for the education of mankind in this 
world, the method of the Divine Teacher anticipated 
our best school-keeping to-day. The old order of Pagan 
society was emphatically an arrangement for grown 
men, in which the women took seats very far back, and 
the children were scarcely heard of. The Christian 
civilization of an American State reverses this order of 
seating, bringing the little children to the front, sup- 
ported by the women, with the solid men arrayed for 
heavy work and a reserve in the background. 

The Great Teacher told the world that childhood is 
nearest the source of all wisdom; that, spite of inher- 
ited tendencies for evil, every little child looks upon 
the face of the Father, and has an infinite horizon of 
possibility and hope ; that there is a natural, divine 
way of developing his nature which can he learned by 
man ; and if he is educated, " led out," in this way, this 
foolish and wicked world of ours will be regenerated by 
wise and holy men and women taking the place of 
those who have passed away. So when the Great 
Teacher took little children in his arms and blessed 
them, and said, "of such is the kingdom of heaven," he 
anticipated Pestalozzi, Froebel, — all our new and beau- 
tiful methods of instruction in school, and the great 
work now going on in civilized lands to serve and bless 



90 TALKS WITLT TEACHERS. 

this world by bringing out the little ones in the true 
order of their life. 

Of course this method of educating little children was 
too simple and profound to be comprehended at once. 
Five hundred years ago, in Europe, education was re- 
garded by the learned orders chiefly as a system of forc- 
ing young men of superior abilities into a straight- 
jacket of Latin, and crabbed, scholastic metaphysics, 
with little regard to natural aptitudes. One of the 
greatest yearly anniversaries in the New England 
kitchen of a generation ago, was the night of sausage- 
making. The great tray, piled with savory chopped 
meat (no dead dogs nor cats need apply) stood in the 
center of the big table. The stoutest woman in the 
household, with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, crammed 
the fragrant mass into the big tin sausage-filler. Then, 
fixing the cover on the nozzle, she brought the whole 
weight of shoulders and back slowly to bear upon the 
wooden pestle till the sausage-skin was filled, to the in- 
finite delight of the youngsters, who looked on and 
sometimes "raised Ned" by slyly pricking the dis- 
tended skin at the critical point, earning, thereby, a 
smart switch from the stick that hung over the fire- 
place. That homely process often reminds us of the old 
scholastic method of university education, — the scholar 
being as thoroughly " filled " with Aristotle and " Lat- 
iny " as the sausage-skin was crammed with its " meat." 
It is one of the standing arguments for the indestructi- 
bility of human nature, that it has not been destroyed 
by the assaults of its schoolmasters. Yet, even amid 
that. dreary night of culture, now and then a great man 
caught a glimpse of a more natural and rational way of 
treating the child. 

In the "fullness of time" came Pestalozzi, and after- 



THE SPIRIT OF TIIE NEW EDUCATION. 91 

wards Froebel, with the group of great men and women 
(some of them of even more practical genius) who have 
revised the whole method of instructing little children, 
Pestalozzi saw the radical truth of all school-keeping 
when he took, as the model school, the home of a good 
wise mother, and told the simple story, — ''Koto Gertrude 
teaches her children" He brought the bewigged, pom- 
pous schoolmasters of Europe to this peasant home, and 
bade them watch this plain. Christian mother as she 
brought up her family of little ones ; to see how she 
taught them to walk, and talk, to observe, to do the 
host of things every baby must learn ; how she brought 
out their mental and moral nature, and moulded the 
character of each child in a way to preserve its original- 
ity, while it was held fast to the everlasting laws of 
wisdom, beauty, and love. At once a great light sprang 
up in the school-room, and from that day on the school- 
mistress and. the schoolmaster have been taught to learn 
their matchless art by studying childhood, watching the 
best habits of good mothers and fathers, specially look- 
ing for the ways by which Divine Providence leads out 
the child's faculties into the life of youth and maturity. 
Thus, while there has been a great deal of attention 
given to the higher education in the university and the 
professional school, the greatest advance of our day has 
been in the marvellous improvements in the handling 
and instruction of little children at school. The school 
buildings have been greatly improved, and made more 
fit for the wholesome and profitable habitation of chil- 
dren. The methods of study, in many schools, have 
been greatly advanced, and all things taught with less 
wear and tear of brain, and far less trounsing of the 
body. The school-books and apparatus have shared in 
the advance. 



92 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

But the greatest effort in our best modern school- 
keeping, has been in the preparation of teachers. In 
one respect the old, common, district school of New 
England had a great advantage. It was taught, in 
winter, by a man, often a student in college or a grad- 
uate ; in summer by the best young woman in town. 
Yet few of the superior teachers of that day had ever 
studied the art of teaching ; and the methods of impart- 
ing knowledge, as we remember them in our childhood, 
in the best of these schools, were often barbarous. The 
few bright boys and girls, who were " quick at figures," 
or stood at the head of the spelling-class, were well off ; 
but the little children were terribly neglected. Their 
whole discipline consisted of a dull lesson in the alpha- 
bet, or reading, two or three times a day ; the re- 
mainder of the six hours given up to sleep, rolling off 
the benches, "cutting capers," dodging the switch, and 
a general state of unrest and torment. But now the 
well-instructed primary teacher of children under ten 
years of age has made a new world of the common 
schoolroom. The vital interest of the greatest minds 
now in the educational field, is given to this funda- 
mental problem ; how best to handle children under 
ten or twelve years of age. It is felt by all competent 
judges that a child, rightly taught till the age of twelve 
years, and then let loose on the world, as it now is con- 
stituted in the foremost States of this Republic, with 
all helps to culture in libraries, lectures, journalism ; 
free church and free discussion, is in a better way to 
grow up a wise man or woman, and a good citizen, than 
a student caught at five and drilled till twenty-five in 
the old unnatural ways of the past, which were such a 
strain on body and mind. The ablest men of the pres- 
sent generation have been obliged to spend years in un- 



THE SPIRIT OF THE NEW EDUCATION. 93 

learning the artificial habits of thought and views of 
things, learned with so much labor in the great univer- 
sities or schools of professional life. And the colleges 
and professional school to-day, in too many instances, 
are the last hiding-place of the old, mechanical system 
of mental sausage-filling, which turned out graduates as 
regular and monotonous as the links of sausage that 
used to tempt our appetite, hanging on the hooks in 
mother's pantry, in the " days of auld lang syne." 



94 TALKS WITH TEACREB8. 



LITERARY ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE 
COMMON SCHOOLS. 

Our neighbor, the Atlantic Monthly, has risen from 
breakfast with its jolly " Autocrat," and girded itself 
for the abolition of the American common school. For, 
if the educational column in its December number is 
anything but the first chapter of a new serial romance 
of its favorite European-cosmopolitan order, our present 
city public school should at once give place to a new 
compulsory, double-headed institution for the training 
of a generation of workmen, instructed betimes in the 
difficult American art of "not rising above their sphere 
in life." According to this educational pronunciamen- 
to, the present American city graded-school system is 
rearing up a nation of idlers. It throws contempt on 
agricultural and mechanical pursuits ; wastes the time 
of the children of the working-classes which should be 
occupied in "industrial training"; is a failure as a 
school of character ; in short, is not a common school, 
but a professional seminary for the training of clerks, 
counter-jumpers, "drummers," and discontented young 
women. The cure is radical. Make public education 
a double-headed training in the elements of knowledge 
and the " use of tools." The girls may be content with 
one tool, — the needle. But, for the boys, a more com- 
plex chest of tools is required in a complete workshop 
attachment to the school-house, in which a mechanical 
expert shall conduct Young America through an elab- 
orate, preliminary training in the use of all implements 
as a sort of preparatory tuning of the instruments be- 



ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE SCHOOLS. 95 

fore the grand burst of harmony that shall usher in our 
new industrial millennium, where every young Amer- 
ican shall go to his own place and keep it. Verily, be- 
tween Father Scully, President Eliot, and the expert of 
the Atlantic, we seem on the point of setting up a new 
"Cambridge platform" in public education, as notable 
as its old-time namesake in theology. 

But there are several rotten timbers under the At- 
lantic's department of this platform, which expose its 
philosophical architects to a sudden letting down to 
Mother Earth. The whole Atlantic scheme rests upon 
a series of assumptions, possible only to a class of peo- 
ple thoroughly aloof from our common American life ; 
amusing themselves by mapping out a revised and cor- 
rected America as unreal as the America of the novels 
of Mr. Howells and Mr. James. 

First : This critique assumes that the children of the 
working-people, as a class, are carried through the com- 
plete system of city graded schools, as laid down in the 
school committee's report. That system, on paper, 
covers a period of fifteen years, from the ages of five 
to twenty. But a glance over the reports of the most 
completely educated cities in New England will reveal 
the relative use of the system by the children. In no 
city in New England are all the children even in the 
primaries; neither do one-tenth enter, nor one-twentieth 
of them graduate, from the high school. The two hun- 
dred of the five thousand who take the entire course in 
a flourishing New England city of 30,000 people, fur- 
nish, probably, twenty young men to the colleges, thirty 
young women to the woman's universities and the pro- 
fession of teaching ; while the remainder will be found 
distributed through the higher walks of business, the 
trades, the professions, and the more intelligent circles 



96 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

of home and social life. Meanwhile, the upper classes 
of the grammar schools only retain the more intelligent 
and persevering, while the vast majority of the children, 
in whose behalf the school is to be offered up, even in 
New England, seldom receive more than six years in- 
struction ; years of two hundred working-days each, — 
five hours a day. Indeed, when we subtract from the 
school-life of this class of city children the unavoidable 
waste of sickness, truancy, and family indifference or 
necessity, it is safe to say that the average workman's 
child has not more than five thousand hours in his life 
for that training and instruction in school which shall 
qualify him for the common duties of American citizen- 
ship. Of this pittance the literary gentlemen of the 
Atlantic would abridge an essential part, for the com- 
pulsory drill in plain sewing and the use of tools. 

Again, this reasoning assumes that the people of 
American cities, of all classes, will be willing to pay for 
a system of schools more expensive than the present, 
adjusted only to the supposed needs of operatives and 
mechanics. For if this scheme carries, the daughters 
of the "toiling masses" will rightly demand the same 
elaborate training in the use of tools as the boys. 
Within ten years the improved sewing-machine will 
banish the old class of sewing-girls to the realm of 
Atlantic Monthly fiction ; and the great mass of working- 
girls will crowd the avenues of the lighter mechanical 
trades. Nowhere can the money be found to support 
this training by mechanical experts save by the over- 
throw of the whole region of the upper grammar, high, 
and training school. This, probably, the Cambridge 
platform proposes. Then, we are invited to believe 
that the well-to-do people, who pay the bulk of the 
school-tax, will consent to perpetuate a secular school 



A SS UMP TIONS ABOUT THE SCHOOL S. 97 

in which their own children can obtain only that 
education devised by a group of magazine writers and 
scientific experts for the development of the working 
and the social convenience of the " superior " class in 
our city life. 

Once more : it is assumed that the city graded school 
of to-day is doing essentially the work of committing 
text-books to memory, which was so large a part of its 
routine a generation ago. But, in every northern city 
and in multitudes of our larger villages, the new 
methods of education are established and bearing fruit. 
That " new education " is the best discipline known to 
man for waking up and developing the faculties of the 
child in the divine order of growth, and bringing him 
in vital contact with science and literature in a way 
that shall furnish a practical method of acquiring 
knowledge through his future life. The present style 
of primary and grammar school, if intelligently admin- 
istered, is the best preparation for the career of a 
ploughman or a poet, — for the girl who " tends baby," 
or drills buttons, and the girl who anticipates five years 
in Europe after her graduation at Vassar. The propo- 
sition to destroy this people's school in favor of the 
educational hybrid presented for baptism by the Atlantic 
club, involves a characteristic assumption of the ver- 
dancy of the average American mind. 

And all through this remarkable plan runs the con- 
temptuous assumption that large numbers of city boys 
and girls are being thoroughly demoralized in their 
habits of work and general style of character by the 
public schools. A statement more thoroughly unjust 
and untrue concerning the better class of American 
city children can hardly be made. There never was, 
and there is not now, in this world, a great body of 



98 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

children and youth doing so much and so good work, 
and bearing themselves in a manner so praiseworthy, 
as the mass of the pupils of our public schools who 
have any fair chance of good supplementary training in 
the home and the church. There are plenty of idle and 
wicked boys and slip-shod girls in our cities. The}?- are 
the vagrant class that swarm the streets of every city 
beyond New England; the multitudes who are being 
gathered into inferior parochial schools by sectarian 
priests ; the considerable crowd for whom the daily dis- 
cipline at school is persistently baffled by a low, reck- 
less, or restless life at home. To thousands of such 
neglected children the public city schoolmistress is 
now a soul-mother, and the master a spiritual father in- 
deed. Where one child is made discontented with com- 
mon life in the public schools, a hundred are saved from 
the perdition of wicked homes. The children who are 
the good and faithful scholars in the schools carry with 
them the same qualities into all the relations of Amer- 
ican life. And to arraign the schools because of their 
occasional failure to turn out "A, "No. 1 " citizens is to 
hold up a test which would shut every American church, 
decimate American families, knock the bottom out of 
Harvard and Yale, and even send the Atlantic to liter- 
ary Coventry. This reckless and cruel impeachment of 
American city school-children may be set down as 
another of the " eccentricities of literary genius " which 
we, common mortals, are so often required to accept as 
the compensation for the delights and honors of a na- 
tional literature. 

And, finally, this new scheme assumes that there is, 
just now, a rising "boom" against the common school- 
system of American cities, and an influential demand 
for the Cambridge platform. There is a growing de- 



ASSUMPTIONS. ABOUT THE SCHOOLS. 99 

termination among great numbers of thoughtful people 
that every public school-house in America shall have, 
behind its course of study, a living teacher ; that the 
mechanism of memoriter recitation and the memory of 
mere word-mongering shall give place to a vital contact 
of soul with soul ; in short, that the new education shall 
step out from the covers of the yearly school report and 
move, incarnate, in the man or woman set by the peo- 
ple to control the school. The masses of thoughtful 
parents do not propose to have their schools " secular- 
ized," according to the programme of Lawyer Inger- 
soll, or " christianized " according to the bull of Father. 
Scully. And they propose to make the whole work of 
school-education tell in the moulding of their children 
into a more intelligent, a broader and a more virtuous 
citizenship. The trouble to-day, at Fall River, at Pitts- 
burg, in the coal regions, is not the lack of special in- 
dustrial training, but of the first principles of genuine 
American manhood in multitudes of workmen, born and 
trained in the European idea of society, which is now 
glorified in certain select circles, East and West, but re- 
ceived its death-blow at Appomattox Court House. 
The trouble with the wives of American workmen is 
not so much the lack of ability to patch their husband's 
trousers and darn the family pile of stockings as that 
timid, superstitious, off-in-a-corner style of semi-foreign 
womanhood which blights their higher maternal influ- 
ence over their growing boys and girls. The cure for 
our rising American communism is not compulsory 
training at public expense in the use of tools, but a 
general liberation and elevation of the upper regions of 
manhood and womanhood through the lower realm of 
American life. 

The influential masses of our people will not make 



100 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

haste to crowd the new Cambridge platform. They 
look upon this whole theory of popular education as the 
outcome of certain styles of high culture and exclusive 
society, excusable enough under the circumstances, but 
absurdly uaadapted for the exigencies of our new Amer- 
ican life. The present system of American free educa- 
tion is far from perfect, but it is, on the whole, in its 
great lines of operation, its improving methods, and the 
increasing efficiency of its teachers, the best thing yet 
for the average American child. In due time, as soon 
as the most reliable of those experts in mechanical 
training will devise the best methods, our men of wealth 
will find establishments to bridge the chasm between 
the city grammar school and the shop and factory. All 
that is needed in this way will surely come. But, 
meanwhile, neither priest nor expert, nor pessimist 
social philosopher nor airy literary romancer will be able 
to switch the solid American people off the great com- 
mon track of the American common school. 



SCHOOL PLUS TEACHER. 101 



SCHOOL PLUS TEACHER. 

We can say, with justice, that the American common 
school of the last 250 years has saved the country to 
republican institutions. The New England pioneer 
alone attempted to educate the whole people before the 
Kevolution, and the 250,000 soldiers of New England, the 
majority of the entire enrollment, carried the Colonies 
through the war. The fact is notorious that the Union 
was saved, twenty years ago, by the States that have 
done best for the intelligence of the whole people in the 
common school, and that the public character and policy 
of the reconstructing Nation is slowly being moulded by 
the same populations. All the forward-looking public 
issues that excite the loathing of the average politician, 
and make the heart of the Christian patriot beat faster, 
are issues of the thoughtful people who have been trained 
in the primitive American congress,— the common school. 
It is not necessary, while claiming this of the com- 
mon school of the fathers, to go off into any romantic 
or economical raptures over the facts ; or, like some of 
our back-action reformers, declare that safety only lies 
in retreating upon the little red schoolhouse of fifty 
years ago. That school did the work ; not because it 
. was better than its successor of to-day, but for the same 
reason that the plank road developed the West, — be- 
cause it was the best thing on the ground at that time. 
Man always splices out the best thing possible under 
the circumstances, with an attachment of the whole 
upper side of human aspiration, hope, and prophecy. 
The reformer of transportation who should seriously 



102 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

propose, before a committee of railroad men, to go back 
to the western plank-road of thirty years ago, would be 
the parallel, in travel, of the educator who has no better 
safeguards against the threatenings of the present than 
backing down hill into the slough where we all wallowed 
before the flood drove us into the Ark and up to the 
mountain-tops of a new civilization. 

But the time has come when we must supplement 
this axiom with a new one, and say : " As, in the past, 
the common school saved the country, so, in the pres- 
ent, the teacher must save the common school." We 
solemnly affirm, as the result of a great deal of observa- 
tion all over the country, that the present advanced 
system of free education in the United States depends, 
for the next quarter of a century, more upon the teacher 
than all other influences combined. 



GOING TO COLLEGE. 103 



GOING TO COLLEGE. 

If you are bound for a college, it will do you good to 
know, in advance, the best thing the best university 
can do for you. Probably any bright boy or girl, under 
private instruction, could obtain as much valuable in- 
formation in two years as even Harvard or Vassar are 
able to lodge in the brain of their superior graduates in 
four. But the one thing no private schooling, no train- 
ing in a little, select seminary can do, is the most valu- 
able use of university life. 

That college is probably }?our first introduction to 
the actual world. It represents to you that variety of 
talent, that diversity of character, that wide difference 
in ideas and ideals of life which supplies the condition 
of all self-knowledge in every successful man or woman. 
You will there be lifted out of the atmosphere of home, 
the town school, the companionships of youth, the pe- 
culiar notions that make the public opinion of your 
native place. In short, you will probably realize 
there, for the first time, that you are, one among a 
multitude of promising young people ; are, at best, 
gifted at one angle of your nature ; are destined to 
spend your life in conflict with others who excel you at 
every point save at this little angle of your real su- 
periority. 

So do not rebel at anything in college which takes 
down your conceit of yourself, or forces upon you the 
conviction that in the battle of life only the man who 
knows himself, and is willing to stand by himself and 
work out his own salvation, will succeed. Far better 



104 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

than all the knowledge in all the libraries is the discov- 
ery that you are but one in a world of people, each with 
some good outfit of nature, each standing in proportion 
as he is faithful to that outfit. And if you can learn, 
in four years, to be grateful especially to all people 
who reveal you to yourself; who "polish off" your ex- 
aggerated opinion of your own merits, and compel you 
to walk through the strait-gate along the narrow way 
of your own proper ability, your college course will be 
justified and your graduation-diploma will be a roll of 
honor. 

Our own most valuable experience in college life was 
not a college honor, but a dishonor. We entered, from 
a country academy, with very decisive ideas of our own 
concerning the value of certain lines of study in the 
curriculum. Of course we neglected the special study 
that seemed to us a waste of time for an aspiring youth. 
.Retribution always waits upon this type of students. 
Ours, happily, came on an autumn day of the first term. 
Called to our feet to recite, we were hit just in the line 
of our neglect, and so unmercifully exposed by our tutor 
that, in despair, we flung down our book, rushed out 
of the class-room, and spent the day in tears and self- 
abasement under the old chestnut-trees of the neigh- 
boring grove. But that day's sorrow was the birthday 
of our mental life. That day, it came to us, as if just 
spoken out of heaven, that we were not quite competent 
to lay out a course of college study ; that the beginning 
of all success is loyalty to duty; that instead of being 
the head, it was possible we were at the tail of our 
class; that there is but one honorable gate out of col- 
lege into life, — the gate of hard work. The young 
tutor who thus became the " means of grace " to a boy 
hse has long forgotton, is now a famous man in a great 



GOING TO COLLEGE. 105 

city ; but he will never do a better service to client or 
constituent than on that autumn day, when he revealed 
one "bumptious" freshman to himself, and set one 
more country youth on the highway to knowledge, rev- 
erence, and a consecrated life. 



G 



106 TALKS WITH TEACHERS, 



THE LABORER AND HER HIRE. 

The rising tide of financial prosperity still halts far 
short of the school-house door. But no interest in the 
country so imperatively demands attention as the wages 
of the women who make the vast majority of teachers 
in our public schools. The earliest reduction in times 
of public calamity falls upon them. During the whole 
period of the late war, the wages of women-teachers, in 
one of the proudest little cities of Massachusetts, were 
ten per cent, below the pay of the better class of ser- 
vants in city houses. To-day, outside a few favored lo- 
calities, where the school-committee has made a success- 
ful fight against the champion " economist " of the 
place, the wages of women-teachers throughout New 
England are disgracefully small. 

It is notorious that the better class of graduates of 
the three normal schools of the State of Maine cannot 
find remunerative employment at home, but are flood- 
ing the city schoolrooms of Massachusetts and the 
West in search of a fair year's wages for a good year's 
work. A superior young woman, who led her class in 
a Massachusetts normal school, writes us that she is 
trying to get to Germany for a year's study, with a com- 
panion-lady in the same town, on a salary of $450 a 
year, out of which she must live and lay up treasure, — 
probably in heaven. When she gets there, — to Ger- 
many, — will she write and tell us how she did it ? 
Another fine young woman we found teaching and su- 
perintending the graded school of a historic village of 
5,000 people, that has not a poverty-stricken house in its 



THE LABORER AND HER HIRE. 107 

boundaries, on a munificent allowance of $9.00 a week; 
paying the market-price for board in a well-to-do family ; 
universally praised by all classes ; but compelled to 
rely for everything, outside board and lodging, on less 
than one hundred dollars a year. The teachers of one 
of the most famous female academies of Massachusetts 
have lived, for years, on even shorter rations ; their 
summer vacations provided for by the kindness of 
thoughtful friends. Indeed, it is a mystery to every- 
body outside the Yankee schoolma'am " ring," how an 
educated woman, a lady by culture, tastes, and associa- 
tions, can turn around in the second-class cities of New 
England, on wages ranging from $350 to $550 a year. 
And the wonder deepens when we know, as any thought- 
ful school committee-man does know, that the majority 
of these faithful teachers are carrying burdens at home 
which divide their salary, and too often keep them at 
work in a leaden cloud of anxiety from year to j^ear. 
In New England the masters take the lion's share of 
money and responsibility; but even the masters are not 
in the way of large investments in the new United 
States 4 per cents. 

Outside of New England the opening is more favora- 
ble for the superior class of women-teachers, who are 
placed at the head of important graded schools in large 
towns, and city grammar schools, and sometimes electe 
supervisors of education for a county. But how the 
women-teachers of the city of Philadelphia manage, is a 
question that can, perhaps, be solved by its city council, 
that voted itself a $10,000 public banquet to Gen. Grant 
(who doesn't drink), and is piling up a city hall big 
enough for the capitol of the united nations of North 
America. From every quarter of the Middle and 
Western States comes up the story, told by the school 



108 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

commissioners of the great wealthy counties of West- 
ern New York ; — the people have everywhere been cut- 
ting down the wages of the school-mistress ; driving 
away skilled teachers, and filling the schoolrooms with 
such women as will work for the pittance offered them 
by " retrenching " boards of trustees. 

Now, we fully sympathize, on the one hand, with every 
intelligent popular protest against poor school-keeping ; 
and, on the other, with the rising demand among 
thoughtful people for skilled labor in the school-room. 
A poor teacher should be paid to get out of the way. 
A " tolerably good teacher," like a tolerably honest 
man or a tolerably chaste woman, has a terrible apti- 
tude at breaking down at the critical point where the 
dead strain comes in. But with what face can our en- 
thusiastic school reformers approach the superior class 
of American women-teachers, the finest body of young 
women in Christendom, with the searching demand of 
the educational expert ? They have already spent from 
fifteen to twenty years, since they were out of the' 
cradle, in study, supported by their parents or friends. 
Their present work is so exhausting that it leaves little 
time for any sort of study, little time for anything save 
the everpresent " sewing," which is the demon of the 
American schoolmistress. Their vacations cannot 
safely be given to severe study, even in a " summer 
school " masquerading as a picnic. More than any 
other class of women, they are carrying burdens in the 
support of families or education of younger brothers 
and sisters. They cannot afford to stop for a year's va- 
cation of rest and study. The expert shouts, — go up 
higher ; — and a good many of them do " go up higher " 
every year, — to the blessed realm where the expert 
ceaseth to worry and the jaded schoolma'am is at rest. 



THE LABORER AND HER HIRE. 109 

There is one way out of this trial, proposed by the 
jolly priest who holds forth in the educational columns 
of the Catholic World. The system of American 
schooling we propose, says the World, in substance, 
does not crush the people with taxation. Our teachers 
are a " consecrated brotherhood and sisterhood ;" un 
married, supported by the church, and live on love and 
not money. As the clerical head of a large parochial 
school in Massachusetts said to a school committee-man : 
"The sisters who teach my school live on what I give 
them. I have the power to take the very clothes from 
their back, if I will." There's cheapness for the daugh- 
ters of America ! Whether the noble army of Amer- 
ican schoolmasters and mistresses will conclude to serve 
the American people in this particular way, remains to 
be seen. 

" But the schools are already so expensive," groans 
Mr. John Kelley, of the New York city board of appor- 
tionment ; and whips out his jack knife to cut away a 
round half-million from the estimates of the school 
board. But is there nothing else in New York expen- 
sive ? How many city officials live on the wages of the 
New York superintendent of schools ? How much 
money is yearly stolen, wasted, voted away to church 
corporations to cover even their stingy allowance to 
their own teachers in that city ? How many millions 
have been fleeced from the people by great corporations, 
like the elevated railroad ; and how many rings are ad- 
vancing up the Hudson to capture the new legislature 
in the new $20,000,000 State House in Albany ? How 
much money was spent on useless presents in New York 
during the past holidays ? How much will be spent 
before Easter in the wild, reckless whirl of fashion, 
which is making New York the new Babylon of the 



110 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

continent ? What interest in that city, the most ex- 
pensive upon earth in proportion to its numbers and 
wealth, can taunt the free school with expensiveness ? 
Can the popular religion ? Can the courts ? Can the 
politics ? Can the homes ? Can the liquor-shops and 
the gambling-hells, and whole streets crowded with 
houses of infamy ? Yet, " gentlemen of property and 
standing " flare up at a school estimate of less than 
$4,000,000 for 1,000,000 people, with thousands of 
children in the streets; and great metropolitan jour- 
nals demand that the whole upper story of the free 
school shall be cut off to enable this poverty-stricken 
municipality to teach the Arabs of the streets the " three 
R's " ! The only fit name for this style of economy is 
Barbarism, with a big B ! 

There is money enough in America to justify the 
American people in putting a skilled man or woman 
into every school-room of the land, and paying that 
teacher a generous salary for the most precious public 
service of the State. There is no need of retrenchment 
in any useful line of expenditure to compass this result. 
A retrenchment of ten per cent, on the sensuality, 
political corruption, and godless luxury of our people 
would re-construct every unfit school-house, and clothe 
every common-school teacher in the " purple and fine 
linen" of a comfortable sense of fair pay and fair play, 
and a cheerful outlook against the day of want. When 
will the American people comprehend this fact ? 



JOHN'S OBJECT-LESSON. Ill 



JOHN'S OBJECT ■ LESSON. 

Our old college chum, John Tomkins, heard the 
discussion at the Massachusetts State Convention of 
Teachers, the other day, on object-teach iDg, and told us 
how he became a disciple of the system, forty years 
ago, before this new-fashioned name had been given to 
a very old-fashioned thing. 

John had been to church and heard an eloquent 
sermon from the text, "He that soweth in tears shall 
reap in joy." Somehow the discourse made very little 
impression, and that of the sort that follows the declara- 
tion of a paradox. But, on Monday, John fell from the 
top rail of a fence in the cow-pasture, broke his leg, and 
was taken home, crying and writhing with pain, and set 
down on a chair to wait for the doctor. While he sat 
there, he told me, it came to him as if it had been 
written upon the wall in letters of fire, "John, don't be 
a coivarcl ! n The doctor came, and in the tedious and 
miserable old-fashioned country-doctor way, pulled and 
pinched and wrenched and worried himself into a great 
sweat setting the poor little fellow's broken leg. But 
he, the owner of the leg, sat there, — like Wellington at 
Waterloo, — pale and faint, but like a rock ; making no 
noise, holding the quivering and throbbing leg firmly 
up to the old doctor's trembling hands. And as the 
trial went on, as he told me, he saw his father's eye 
kindle with a look of pride, and his mother turned her 
face to brush the tears from her kindling cheeks, and 
his two sisters nestled up to him, as if to say, " Here is 
the brother fit to be our hero " j and through the crack 



112 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

of the kitchen-door another girl's face was peering in, 
with a look that would pay a grown man for losing both 
legs, — for losing everything but his heart out of his 
breast. And when he lay on hi3 bed, week after week, 
while the broken leg was getting well, he noticed how 
everybody treated him with a sort of respect, as if he 
were a grown man ; and when he went back to school, 
the teacher took his hand with a peculiar grip ; and the 
whole world was different, after that day, from the 
world before the doctor came to set his broken leg. 

John didn't understand it all then, but he now under- 
stands what it all meant : that the hardest path in this 
world, if followed resolutely to the end, will lead a boy 
or a man to all the splendid things of life, if he will 
walk in it as ordered by the good Father of all the boys 
and girls in the world. 



HOME MISSIONS FOR THE SCHOOLS. 113 



HOME MISSIONS FOR THE SCHOOLS. 

The most serious obstacle to tlie improvement of the 
public schools now is the ignorance of their organiza- 
tion and practical working by the people who pay for 
and depend upon them for the training of their children. 
Within the past twenty years the school-keeping of the 
country has lunged ahead in the same wholesale way as 
our new politics, journalism, and society. Great things 
have been attempted, and, considering the helter-skel- 
ter way in which the movement for the new education 
has been pushed, remarkable things have been accom- 
plished. But it is fearful to think how small a number 
of people have been responsible for this mighty revolu- 
tion in methods of instruction.. 

A little group of enlightened and resolute teach- 
ers, backed by a few broad-minded and cour geous 
school committee-men, have planned the campaign, offi- 
cered the army, captured city after city, forced im- 
proved education through the villages into the outlying 
hamlets, compelled private schools to reconstruct their 
programmes, and, generally, carried forward the cause of 
the children. The people followed, under the impulse 
of the great national reconstruction, and gave the 
school-men the means to get their system on the ground. 

All this was suddenly reined in by the sharp bit of 
the financial panic. The champion economist in every 
town drove at the school appropriation as the biggest 
pile of public money in sight, and reveled in the joy of 
cutting down salaries, consolidating and reducing ex- 
penses in a field so promising. Such an opportunity 



114 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

for protest against the whole movement would not be 
wasted by the crowd of chronic objectors, superseded 
teachers, and aggrieved parents, always ready for a cru- 
sade upon the schools. For the last three years the 
new system has been roughly assailed, thrown on its 
defence, and, in some cases, disorganized and beaten 
down. It is, however, a striking proof of the general 
wisdom of this movement that, on the whole, it can be 
said the American system of education has received 
no vital damage in any essential department from this 
assault along the whole line. 

But now the one imperative need is a more intelli- 
gent understanding of that system, at least by the 
superior people of our community ; the men who sit in 
legislatures and municipal boards, and are chosen to ad- 
minister and nominally to establish the people's schools. 
Any school-man of experience is painfully aware of the 
amazing lack of information, even in cultivated quar- 
ters, on matters that should be familiar to the parent 
of every school-child. How many of the leading mer- 
chants, lawyers, physicians, and women of society, to 
say nothing of mechanics and laboring people, in our 
most cultured cities, could give an inquiring foreigner 
an intelligent account of the common schools ? Such 
a condition of popular ignorance is a constant invita- 
tion to all enemies of the schools, educational humbugs 
and destructives, to make damaging charges by the 
wholesale and launch visionary theories. And it is 
amazing to see how many excellent people are deceived 
or confused by this outcry, and unwittingly brought 
into an attitude of opposition to a cause they have most 
deeply at heart. 

It is gratifying to see that the*press is recognizing 
this call for information, and, after a sort, moving to in- 



HOME MISSIONS FOR THE SCHOOLS. 115 

form the people. Of course, a vast amount of this 
writing, even in the most pretentious quarters, has been 
wide of the mark ; the vaporing of crude theorists or 
the reckless stirring-up of the sensational journalist 
who hits a head wherever he sees it. But one thing is 
gained, — the journals and magazines are opening their 
columns to the discussion of the new education. 

Now is the time for our best teachers, our most effect- 
ive superintendents, and our wisest school-men to claim 
their rightful place as writers and speakers to the peo- 
ple. If anybody knows what the new education is, cer- 
tainly these men and women who have given it to the 
country are able to explain their own work. 

It is remarkable how much 3a n really be done by the 
humblest country school-mistress, who knows what she 
is about, to interest and instruct the people of her district 
in the new ways of education. It is not too much k> say 
that an association, composed of the teachers of any 
country town, in a reasonable time, could wake up the 
community to an intense interest in their schools, and 
virtually overcome the opposition to progress. Our 
people learn fast in these revolutionary days, and noth- 
ing is so interesting to "all sorts and conditions of 
men" as their children. If the teachers through the 
rural districts still complain of a low state of public 
opinion in education, are they not themselves partially 
responsible for it ? 

We do not believe the corps of superior teachers in 
any of our cities realizes its power to vitalize public 
opinion in this direction. However faithful in the 
school-room, as long as they are out of sight, reticent, 
undemonstrative, off in corners meekly complaining 
over their wrongs, they will be largely at the mercy of 
their enemies. What could not be done by a body of 



116 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

men and women so eminent, so accustomed to the pen, 
so near to parents as the superior teachers of any State, 
to clear up misunderstanding, explain methods, expose 
pretentious schemes of reform, and overthrow the 
scheming foes of the American school ! 

The best outfit for any teacher in this mission-work 
for the children is a good educational periodical ; not 
skimmed in a reading-room, or read in the hasty way it 
must be by the members of a club ; but taken, paid for, 
thoroughly read and digested, and bound up in the 
most valuable of all volumes for the teacher's reference. 
Many a school -mistress now anxious for her position, or 
groaning over a stingy salary, would have been far on 
the other side of Jordan, to-day, had she thoroughly 
read, applied, and communicated to her parishioners 
such a journal. In the searching times that are coming 
upon our teachers, only they who can thus " give a rea- 
son for the faith that is in them," and build up around 
themselves an intelligent constituency, can hope to sur- 
vive. Teacher ! begin the new year, 1880, by turning 
over a new leaf. Supply yourself with the best school 
journal and a library of education, and take the field in 
your own little kingdom as one of God's missionaries 
to the children ; and great shall be your reward. 






THE STUDENTS SISTER. 117 



THE STUDENT'S SISTER. 

The second-best man in our college-class had a sister. 
She must have been a little sister then, for her brother 
didn't talk about her in that mysterious way in which 
the fellows in college are wont to refer to big sisters 
who may be suspected of being candidates for post- 
graduate honors in connection with the superior men of 
the class. But he was evidently fond of the little girl 
at home, and wasn't ashamed to let his class-mates 
know it. He also had aspirations for the little sister. 
She came of good Yankee stock, and those were days 
when about the highest thing to which a Yankee girl 
could aspire (next to marrying a minister) was to be- 
come a schoolmistress in a first-class academy, if es- 
pecially exclusive, in a " female academy " of the good, 
old-fashioned Congregational type. 

The little sister, in time, grew up and became just 
that, — the mistress in a renowned u female academy." 
We kept track of her outs and ins for a few years, and, 
then, twenty more years, with a war inside them, rolled 
like a great sea between our new Western home and 
the dear, old " down East." Back again, seven years 
ago, we began our long tramp in behalf of the schools 
among the old towns of Massachusetts, fondly remem- 
bered as part of the far-off years before the flood. How 
strangely these boys and girls of thirty years ago look 
out upon you from eyes shadowed by grizzled eyebrows ; 
through the mask of faces, written all over with the 
wondrous story of the last generation of our awful 
American life ! 



118 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

But, one morning, as we sat, at early breakfast-time, 
in the home of a solid farmer, among the foot-hills of 
the Berkshires, the bountiful table girdled by a ring of 
bright-eyed boys (their big sister away at the "female 
academy "), an old memory flashed out through the face 
and eyes of the mother of the household. What was 
it ? Was she, too, one of the girls of old Deerfield 
Academy who have appeared on the scene at every 
point on two continents, visited by us, for the last thirty 
years ? No, — not there ; nowhere have we seen that 
face ; but one like to it, as brother is likened to sister, 
when both are the scions of a famous old stock that 
scores its sign and seal on its every child to the last 
generation. Now, with the help of madam., it all comes 
out. She is the little" sister of our second-best man at 
college, graduated from mistre&sship in the " female 
academy" to the place of wife and mother in the big 
farmhouse, and joint-mistress of broad acres of pasture 
and fields, just where the lower Berkshires dip down to 
that paradise of meadow we call, in our poor speech, 
the valley of the Connecticut. 

Why all this pother about the "higher education" of 
a generation ago, with a turn at schoolma'aming in a 
famous "female academy," to graduate a farmer's wife at 
the end, — not one of those charming young ladies from 
Boston that keep a summer hotel in a country palace 
on the fancy farm of their husband, who is burying his 
father's hundred thousands in a grand agricultural ex- 
periment, — but the bona fide article of a New England 
farmer's wife, up to her eyes in real work, every line in 
her face telling the story of the good fight that country 
life in New England must be to every woman who holds 
the reins of her own home ? 

There is no time, now, to discuss that question across 



THR STUDENT'S SISTER. 119 

the table. The farm-wagon is up, and the biggest boy- 
shouts from the driver's seat that the train waits for no 
man. But once off on our three-mile drive to the sta- 
tion, the problem of the "higher education," in the 
little sister's case, rapidly clears up. This pair of wide- 
awake boys are on their daily morning drive to the best 
school in Western Massachusetts. My lecture of the 
night before is handled by these youngsters in a way 
that puts the lecturer on his metal, and makes him not 
unwilling to alight in the midst of an elaborate attempt 
to explain a somewhat ticklish position under the second 
head. The "higher education," planted a generation 
ago amid the quiet valleys of old Hampshire County, 
in the quiet soul of the little Yankee sister, has taken 
root, blossomed through toilsome years, and borne this 
precious cluster of household fruity this group of brave 
boys and gentle girls, up to anything likely to happen 
in this republic for a generation to come. 

Because our country, from the woods of Aroostook to 
the gardens of Santa Barbara, is full of little sisters 
bound to get all the education going, do we all take 
heart and hope of the republic that is to be. The one 
sovereign American woman's right is to make herself a 
woman fit to go anywhere, at home or abroad, and 
everywhere glorify the name of an American woman- 
hood, shaped according to the likeness of wisdom, 
beauty, and love. To such a generation of our sisters 
all good things will flow, all vital rights be granted ; 
and from such shall proceed that blessed era of " peace 
on earth and good-will to men," which shall blend all 
our discords in the harmony of a union at one with it- 
self and at one with mankind. 



120 TALKS WITH TEAOIEBS. 



CAMILLA IN THE SCHOOL -ROOM. 

Every schoolboy remembers the nimble-footed maiden, 
Camilla, who, according to Virgil, possessed the grace- 
ful and convenient gift of skimming over the surface of 
the fields without so much as bending the tips of the 
blades of grass, or rustling the pollen of the flowers. 
All ancient fables have their counterpart of fact in these 
new days, at least in the world of mind ; and in more 
than one American school-room an American school- 
mistress, twice as handsome and ten times as " smart " 
as Virgil's "girl of the period," is going through a 
series of mental gymnastics, every way as wonderful to 
the bewildered youngsters who are looking on. 

We happened in, one day, upon a first-class primary 
school-room, in a city that justly makes great boast of 
its public schools. The room was everything that could 
be desired; and with its cheerful light, pure air, lovely 
grouping of simple ornaments, suitable pictures, school 
apparatus and furniture, was itself a capital training- 
school in that most important branch, the art of living 
and behaving in a good house. Every child in that 
room will be more determined to make a comfortable 
and pleasant home, and know better how to live in it, 
for his year's experience amid its pleasant surroundings. 

There was no fault to be found with the course of 
study. The most inveterate grumbler against "cram- 
ming" would have seen how the children of to-day learn 
half-a-dozen things in half the time the child in the old 
district-school " got the hang " of the alphabet. The 



CAMILLA IN TEE SCEOOL-ROOM. 121 

discipline was a perfect vindication of all the money- 
spent on music, gymnastics, and drawing in that school- 
room. And there, as in so many modern school-houses, 
Christ's blessed law of love had "free course, run, and 
was glorified." 

What then was the matter with that school ? Just 
what is the matter with a good many of our primary 
schools, which, missing one thing, miss the secret of 
success. To a practiced eye, a five minutes' inspection 
revealed " a failure to connect," all round the room ; a 
sense of a general disjointing of minds ; a great breeze 
of electric enthusiasm covering a painful lack of knowl- 
edge of what the enthusiasm was about ; a sort of dazed 
and bewildered condition of all the faculties, reminding 
one of the pious old lady from the country, sitting on 
the church-steps, in the main street of the local me- 
tropolis, as the mighty Fourth-of-July procession swept 
by, crying out, "Oh, if this world is so beautiful, what 
will it be in the world to come ! " All this, and a good 
deal that can only be felt, gave us a growing sense of 
uneasiness as we sat on the platform. 

There was great danger that we should overlook this, 
and mistake the splendid girl-teacher, fresh from the 
best normal training, for the school. For she filled the 
room with that indescribable charm of enthusiastic 
activity, which we see nowhere outside our best modern 
primary schools; positively a new revelation of the 
capacity of young womanhood, and largely accounting 
for the sudden arrest in the development of so many of 
these lovely girl-teachers, by the appearance on the 
scene of another member of the ancient group of divini- 
ties. There was no lack of love for the little ones in 
this particular schoolmistress. Her daily presence must 
have been a brighter light than the common sunshine 



? TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

to every little one of her flock. Of course she taught 
them religion in its essence, — " good morals and gentle 
manners," — being herself the incarnation of the "law 
of kindness." She also waked up the mind of the 
dullest boy on the back seat, and broke up, every five 
minutes, the desperate flirtation of a little golden-haired 
coquette with two susceptible youngsters in velvet 
jackets and red stockings on either side. Each of her 
fifty scholars who lives twenty years will, sooner or 
later, feel that mental awakening, like the coming in 
of a high tide upon a sluggish creek, flooding all the 
shores and washing a whole raft of stranded lumber far 
out to sea in its retreat. The mistress did everything 
save one, and that one is the bolt that clenches our 
whole fabric of school-work and approves it to a prac- 
tical man. 

She didn't teach the things set doivn in her course of 
study. At the end of a term of that exciting and charm- 
ing life in her school-room, those children will not be 
able to read, spell, write, use simple numbers, speak 
with accuracy, sing and draw with intelligence. They 
will go up to the next grade in the state of spiritual ex- 
hilaration and mental uncertainty voiced by the young 
lady at the Concord School of Philosophy, last summer, 
— " Oh, I don't understand it very well ; but it 's per- 
fectly magnificent ! " And just this lack of a hard-pan 
of accurate knowledge of the elements, unless supplied 
within a year or two, will leave those children all afloat, 
every year more confused and discouraged, till half of 
them will fall out of school in sheer hopelessness, and 
the rest will flounder through grammar school, high 
school, college; through life outside the school, until 
some good providence takes them back to some mother's 
knee and begins again that most painful of all work, — 



CAMILLA IN THE SCHOOL -BOOM. 123 

the work of learning the lesson of a child after one has 
become a woman or a man. 

It was the old fable of Camilla repeated in the modern 
school-room. That charming young schoolmistress was 
skimming over the tops of the grass-blades and the 
flowers, propelled by an uncontrollable enthusiasm, 
kindled by the very sight of her children, fed by the 
highest motives, and nursed as tenderly as a mother's 
love for her new baby. But one thing she had not 
learned, — that strange conservatism and slowness of 
pace by which a little child first essays to walk the 
path of knowledge. She was all the time mistaking the 
enthusiasm of the children over herself for their under- 
standing of what she was trying to teach. She did not 
quite touch the mind of the average pupil in her room, 
though perhaps half-a-dozen of the fifty did follow her, 
did most of the work, and will come out a brilliant show- 
group on examination-day. All this she will learn, by- 
and-by, and five years hence, if she remains a primary 
school-teacher, will somewhat veil her perilous enthusi- 
asm and walk slowly and softly by the toddling intellect 
of the least of her little ones, leaving the Camilla busi- 
ness to the half-dozen preternatural youngsters, who 
will fancy they are teaching the mistress a hundred 
things, while she is patiently and modestly laying that 
sure foundation of mental accuracy without which the 
loftiest genius is only one more splendid featherhead. 

Teachers of the little children, remember that for the 
next thirty years this country of ours will have use for 
a prodigious amount of clear, accurate thought in a vast 
number of "level heads," to save it from worse things 
than have yet come upon us. Be as charming, as en- 
thusiastic, as like Virgil's girl of the mythological 
period as you will, everywhere; but remember that 



124 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

little children walk very slow in the beginning of their 
mental life. School yourself to walk softly ; to think 
and feel and live in a child's way. For the Great 
Master says : " Verily I say unto you, unless ye become 
as little children ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom 
of heaven." 



A GUILD'S LIBRARY. 125 



A CHILD'S LIBRARY. 

One of the most useful of recent new departures in 
education is the practical union of the public library 
and the public school in the teaching of English litera- 
ture. In many of our cities and villages the higher 
grades of the schools are supplied with copies of the 
English classics for general reading ; lists of suitable 
books for young people are distributed, and the teach- 
ers cooperate in many admirable ways. 

But, after all, there is a point not yet touched even 
by this excellent arrangement. The bent of reading is 
often taken before the child reaches the school grade for 
which these arrangements are made. A great public 
library to a ten-year-old boy is a good deal like the 
starry firmament ; very magnificent to look up to, but 
not a very familiar place to abide in. Besides, the books 
do not belong to him and must be hastily read, often at 
times when reading is not a pleasure. Our own expe- 
rience has convinced us that, for the average child, the 
element of possession of a book is of great importance. 
The borrowed book, however attractive, is never read 
with the loving enthusiasm with which the child de- 
vours the volume that is his own. Try the experiment 
of loaning to your pupil Scott's Lady of the Lake, Rob- 
inson Crusoe, The Arabian Nights. Give to another 
pupil the same book as his own property. In nine cases 
out of ten, the borrowed book will be read on the gallop, 
hastily taken in and forgotten. The book owned by 
the child will be read leisurely, returned to, and lin- 
gered over with loving fondness ; taken out under the 



126 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

qrees in summer ; taken down from the shelf for con- 
sultation ; really assimilated into the mental and moral 
being. It is the most common-place truism, that the 
value of reading does not depend half as much upon 
the quantity gone over as the quality of the book and 
the deliberate and thoughtful method of using it. 

Now the natural way to interest a child in reading 
is to give it a book, suitable to its years and mental 
condition, and leave it to its own way of appropriating 
its contents. Every child, now-a-days, even the poor- 
est in the public schools, should be encouraged to found 
a library. This is a large phrase, but like many an- 
other great thing, may grow up from very small begin- 
nings. The corner-stone of the child's library should 
be his first text-book in school, or the first book given 
him before school years. Encourage your pupil to 
gather up every book that belongs to him, not omitting 
the least picture-book, or even pictured alphabet, game, 
or Christmas-card. Save everything. Keep every 
text-book. File every child's paper or magazine. In 
a little time the family and friends will find out what 
John or Julia is about, and presents of good books will 
come in apace. The boy who sees a growing book-shelf 
every morning, when he gets out of bed, will have a 
constant reminder to save his pennies to buy some fa- 
vorite book, rather than spoil his stomach with candy 
or buy a ticket to the " Black Crook." Now-a-days, 
when readable editions of the English classics can be 
bought for fifty cents a volume, almost every child is 
able to buy a few good books every year. It is surpris- 
ing how soon such a library assumes respectable dimen- 
sions, and amazing how many beautiful books and val- 
uable magazines are destroyed by children, now-a-days, 
or want of some definite plan of keeping them together. 



A CHILD'S LIBBABY. 127 

And anybody who knows child-nature can understand 
how much more thoroughly the books of that home- 
library will be read than the volumes borrowed from 
any source. 

And what a precious possession is such a library, 
however small, to every youth. Every passing year is 
chronicled with some new and valuable addition to the 
growing bookcase. And now the mysterious law of as- 
sociation comes in, and every volume is transmuted by 
the imagination into a sacred memorial of the past. 
That little pictured alphabet brings back the face of 
the mother, the admiring group, the very day and hour 
of the wonderful gift. Here is a volume with the au- 
tograph of the schoolmate who has passed on to the 
great university in the heavens. This faded text-book, 
with its torn leaves, recalls the tussle with a hard lesson 
which gave you the first sense of conscious mental 
power. This poem was "the gate called beautiful" 
through which you entered the enchanted realm of 
Longfellow or Wordsworth, or began to climb the Al- 
pine steeps of Milton, or looked off upon the wonderland 
of Shakespeare. This is the novel your sister read 
aloud when you were getting up from the scarlet-fever, 
and this is the verf chapter that set you laughing till 
mother came in, suppressed the book, and put you off 
to bed, " weak as a rat." And here, as you live, is the 
stain of a flood of tears, rained down on a page that 
storme* your heart, twenty years ago, and made you 
realize that childhood had passed and your womanhood 
had come. 

Teachers and parents, set your children to this good 
work of founding a child's library, and keep them at 
it till they need no pushing from you. And it may 
turn out that a few shelves of good books will educate 
your child more than all the schools and universities. 



128 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



THE PEOPLE AND THE SCHOOLS. 

The greatest need, just now, of our American system 
of free education for the whole people is that the whole 
people should know just what it is ; understand 
what it proposes to do ; what it is now doing ; what it 
can be made to do ; at least as well as they understand 
their ordinary affairs of business and government. "We 
are no such visionary as to suppose that even the most 
intelligent or best educated class of our people are to 
become experts in school-keeping. As society develops, 
under the formative power of science, freedom, and 
Christian civilization, all difficult tasks in professional 
and public, as well as industrial life, must be handed 
over to experts, trained in the best methods of doing 
important things. But the one question below the 
question of skilled labor, everywhere in this republic, 
is, Shall the people be governed by rings of infallible 
and despotic experts, or shall the experts be elected, 
surrounded, supported, and in the last result, governed by 
an intelligent, virtuous, free people, who propose, from 
this day on, to sit down under no emperor, called by 
whatever name ? 

There is a great deal of valuable talk in certain culti- 
vated quarters, about the dire necessity that the peo- 
ple's work should be done by the most skillful men. 
All right ; polish up your experts, in all corners of 
American life ; there is all the distance between the top 
of the Himalayas and the "loftiest star of unascended 
heaven n for great men to grow in. But, meanwhile 



THE PEOPLE AND THE SCHOOLS. 129 

let the word be passed round that the sovereign people 
of the United States of America don't intend to resign 
one jot or tittle of the sovereignty won through the 
toil and tears and blood of two hundred and fifty years, 
to anybody. And the people know just what they mean 
when they say this. They know that if they want the 
best work done by the skilled men who can best do it, 
in the mill or in the schoolhouse, they must school 
themselves to know good work when they see it ; to dis- 
criminate a real expert from a pedant, a tyrant, or a 
humbug of any sort. And in this vexed matter of 
school-keeping, over which the experts are just now 
making such a pother, — some of them blandly propos- 
ing that the people shall quietly abdicate and put the 
whole business of caring for that end of the Republic 

into the hands of commissioners appointed for life, 

the people propose to have the experts, have the best 
teaching, have the best schools, but in the American 
way ; by making themselves intelligent and independ- 
ent and right-minded enough to appreciate, demand, 
have, pay for and defend the best education against all 
the world. 

It is not so strange that the people of that part of the 
United States which is just now responsible for ad- 
vanced republican institutions, are a little behind in the 
discussion of this mighty theme of the fit education of 
their children. This portion of the American people, 
within the past twenty years, has done the biggest 
stroke of work ever done on this planet in the line of 
public affairs. It has raised, fought, and disbanded an 
army of 1,000,000 men ; put down a rebellion that in- 
volved a country twice as large as Europe west of the 
Russian line ; reconstructed a conquered people up to 
the forms of constitutional government; licked into 
G 



130 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

shape, funded, and begun to pay a prodigious national 
debt, and worked its way out of a national industrial 
panic into the opening year of a marvelous national 
prosperity. And all the time this portion of our peo- 
ple has been doing many good tilings for its own towns 
and cities, and private affairs at home. Within the 
past twenty years the oldest portions of the Republic, 
old Massachusetts, old Rhode Island, old Connecticut, 
have " gone up," and in their place are now three com- 
monwealths, as thoroughly new and progressive as Cali- 
fornia, Kansas, and Colorado. 

Now while the leading people of the North have 
been doing all these things, the superior teachers and 
the schoolmen and women have been at work, as no 
such body of people ever worked in this world, to recon- 
struct the American system of education, from the pri- 
mary school to the University, and make it a fit train- 
ing-school for the American citizenship, American man- 
hood and womanhood, on which the republic absolutely 
depends. The mass of our best-informed and most ac- 
tive people, even the men who have made the law?, 
that have set this new educational machine in motion, 
have not, themselves, always or often known just what 
they were at. They have trusted in this, as in other 
affairs, to those who were supposed best to know. The 
mass of the people have known one thing well, — that 
they were determined, first and last, to have the best 
possible education for their children, at as little expense 
as possible, but to have it. Now that this system is on 
the ground from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon, 
the people are waking up to ask what it is they have been 
doing; and naturally enough, in this general awaking, 
there is a great shout of opposition, criticism, denuncia- 
tion, filling the air, especially concerning the American 



THE PEOPLE AND THE SCHOOLS. 131 

system of free schools. More than one legislature of a 
Northern State of this Union, within the last few years, 
has been beset by an excited lobby demanding such 
changes in our system of free public instruction as 
would scuttle the free school and let us all down to 
the educational mud-bottom of the Europe of a gen- 
eration ago. 

Now, the thing to be done, as we see it, is for the 
people, especially the people who have children to be 
educated, to reply to all this clamor, — Hold on; not ?o 
fast ! We have been at work, here in these Northern 
States of America, since the landing of the Pilgrims, to 
build up a system of free education for the people. We 
have such a system now on the ground. It does the work, 
certainly, after a fashion. Some of the work it does very 
well. Some of it can be improved. There may be some 
things it has not yet attempted to do which can now be 
attempted. It may be one-sided, pedantic, bookish, as 
you say; if so, it can be reconstructed. But, at pres- 
ent, our children are at school, and we don't propose to 
burn down the schoolhouse to drive out a few rats that 
infest it, or take down the whole side of a college to let 
one new expert go in. Give us time. We have a little 
more leisure now than during the twenty years past, to 
look this thing over ; to find out what the teachers and 
the schoolmen propose to do for us ; what we now 
have on the ground; what is likely to be the outcome 
of the best things now going on among the children. 
As fast as these great changes you propose appear to us 
practicable, and suitable to the condition of a free peo- 
ple, we shall find it out and help you to alter, amend, 
reconstruct, preserve or destroy, as may be the call of 
the hour. 



132 TALES WITH TEACHERS. 



A SMATTERING OF THINGS. 

There is a great deal of rather loose talk, to the effect 
that our public-school system is rearing up a generation 
of smatterers and superficialists. The contrast is often 
made between what is called the thorough system of 
years ago, when the " three R's " were taught " thor- 
oughly/' and the present, when even the primary course 
of study in graded schools groans with half-a-dozen 
"ologies," each of which might knock the breath out of 
the body of a scientific professor. A good many experts 
in science and literature are loudly protesting that the 
new education is a waste of power, diffusing the activity 
of the school over a vague realm of multifarious inves- 
tigation, but leaving the children, on examination-day, 
with only a " smattering of things." 

Now, all poor teaching and dead-alive studying in the 
school-room is fair game for anybody. A good deal of 
that funny sort of "oral instruction" that the New 
Bedford school authorities mistook for the " new meth- 
ods " is so absurd that the wonder is that so shrewd a 
man as Superintendent Harrington ever tried it at all. 
Yet in numbers of schools, just this mistake is being 
made, and many a teacher is pulverizing her brains in 
the invention of blackboard school-books, and pouring 
a thin mixture of science and water over the heads of a 
crowd of jolly urchins, who lean back with unmitigated 
joy to see how the mistress does it. By all means let 
Superintendent Harrington warn till that sham no 
longer vexes the people and demoralizes the children. 

But the new education, as expounded by Dickinson, 



A SMATTERING OF THINGS. 133 

and operated by Calkins, Sheldon, and Rickoff, and the 
great school-men and women of the West, is another 
thing. This means the most serious and sacred dealing 
with the little child, as a being of divine origin and im- 
mortal destiny, full of glorious faculties, set down for a 
while in this corner of the universe, as in a primary 
school, to learn the use of its powers, gain an outlook 
through the main vistas of knowledge and life, and get 
well on its feet to run the race appointed for every son 
or daughter of God. Of course, this radical idea of ed- 
ucation underlies all fruitful teaching and discipline in 
church and home, and all truly republican government, 
no less than instruction in schools. The one persistent 
method of education for despotism in church or state is 
to assume the natural incompetency of the child, and 
mould it by a system of cram in every region of its life, 
superintended by a despotic pedagogue, called indiffer- 
ently parent, king, priest, or schoolmaster. This is the 
kind of instruction that is fatal to all real education, be- 
cause it leaves the soul of the pupil crushed and dwarfed 
and childish, hardly capable of stowing away the material 
that is flung upon it by the teacher. The whole oper- 
ation reminds one of a small boy, with a pitchfork 
planted in the center of a great hay-mow, trying to catch 
the avalanche from the man who unloads the contents 
of the great wagon in the air above his head. The wide- 
awake boy will probably succeed in " mowing away " 
the fragrant fodder with only an occasional knock down ; 
but the average boy will be buried out of sight before 
the wagon is half emptied. Thus, in thousands of great 
schools in the past, dominated by mighty old peda- 
gogues, did multitudes of children fight for dear life. 
The few of original genius and unusual ability came 
forth rejoicing. But, alas, for the sprained limbs, 
broken backs, and caved-in heads of the great " common 



134 TALES WITH TEACHERS. 

herd," for whom this kind of thoroughness was quite 
too much ! No wonder that the whole crowd of peda- 
gogues of this type is not only opposed to the new 
methods, but skeptical of even the capacity of the aver- 
age child for what it calls education. Onl} T a born in- 
tellectual athlete can face that storm of "thorough 
teaching" and live. 

But this gospel according to cram is " thorough " only 
in the sense that it aims to fill the mind of the pupil 
with a complete catalogue of the facts belonging to any 
science. But, inasmuch as it neglects the proper disci- 
pline of the powers by which alone everlasting ideas, 
principles, and laws can be discovered and applied in 
dealing with these facts and living a man's true life in 
God's universe, this system is the very essence of super- 
ficiality. The pupil is left the most hopeless smatterpr 
in the independent use of his powers and the vital ap- 
prehension of knowledge, and there is imminent danger 
that the more he knows the greater fool he will become. 
This fact explains the wretched bungling always made 
of public affairs by the " cultivated classes," when culti- 
vated by the method of despotism. The rule of an aristoc- 
racy of pedants and priests is, of all governments, the 
most intolerable, and provocative of revolution. The peo- 
ple of the United States are right in declining to intrust 
great public interests to a " cultivated class," or to ex- 
perts of any kind trained in this way. The all out- 
doors, rough-and-tumble school of frontier life, through 
which Washington and Lincoln grew up to commanding 
power, has a thousand-fold its right to be called "scien- 
tific education," because it is a real training of all the 
human faculties, and the placing the man himself on his 
own feet, with the ability to know, act, and worship ac- 
cording to the opportunities and demands of his provi- 
dential career. 



A SMATTERING OF THINGS. 135 

A child in a good graded school is not made a smat- 
terer by language-lessons that enable it to read, write, 
and express its thoughts in natural and characteristic 
style. Its feet are truly planted on the high road both 
to literature and philology ; and the same natural use 
of its faculties that has brought it thus far will make it 
a Longfellow or a Max Miiller if the natural aptitude 
be there. It is not a smattering of botany to require a 
little boy to bring to the class a wayside flower and 
daily test its powers of observation upon it ; learning 
enough in three months to open its e} T es forever to the 
gospel of the flowers, the meadow, and the forest. Just 
by doing this all its life, with the aid of a good manual, 
will it become the sort of botanist so eloquently described 
in one of the essays of Christopher North. So with 
every topic that figures in the new course of study for 
the primary, district, or grammar school. The men 
and women who have formulated that course of study 
have not the slightest idea of turning out a generation 
of experts. Their primary object is to awaken, for life, 
that love of truth and thirst for knowledge, and con- 
scientious devotion to work, which is the great moral 
steam-engine that moves all real education; next, to de- 
velop the powers by actual contact with things, and 
thoughts, under the lead of a vital teacher ; and, finally, 
to open vistas through several great realms of knowl- 
edge and life along which the child may walk in its fu- 
ture, according to its taste and opportunity. Of course 
if this work is not thoroughly done, there is a deplora- 
ble collapse, and the new school becomes, in its way, as 
useless as the old. But, if rightly worked by a compe- 
tent teacher, the new method is the very soul of thor- 
oughness, sending out into the world a thorough girl or 
hoy, without which all things in earth and heaven are at 
odds through time and eternity. 



136 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



SOME GROUNDS FOR THE SUPPORT OF 
HIGHER EDUCATION BY THE STATE. 

It cannot fail to strike the historical student that 
every civilized nation in the world, from the ^beginning 
of time, has provided, to a greater or less extent, for 
the education of a superior class in superior schools, 
at public expense ; the only difference between the 
nations having been in their disposition to extend 
the public aid to the elementary education of the 
whole people. 'But, on the question of the public 
support of the superior education, the civilized people, 
ancient and modern, are unanimous. 

A moment's thought reveals the entire reasonableness 
of this universal habit of all human governments. For, 
while it may be questioned whether the welfare of the 
State requires the enlightenment of the entire body of 
its people, nobody but a madman can believe a nation 
can endure without a strong body of superior people to 
shoulder the mighty responsibilities and perform the 
crushing labors of the upper region of its life. A peo- 
ple, called by any political name, who are all sunk to 
the low level of knowledge- and reflection, in which the 
mass of mankind is so prone to linger, would be a 
national madhouse before sunset of any day. A people 
of this sort, with a small class of powerful and trained 
men at the top of society, becomes what the majority 
of nations have always been. Only when the gap be- 
tween the unintelligent or partially-educated masses 
and the highest class is bridged by a strong body of 
well-informed and well-trained men and women, does 
the State move on in the happy mean of constitutional 



HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE STATE. 137 

government, well balanced by freedom and law. Sir 
Lyon Playfair says the curse of the Irish people, to- 
day, is the absence of such a class. The national and 
church schools have educated the mass just up in range 
of the agitating press and the insane leaders who have 
always played the demagogue at that unhappy people's 
expense ; while the solid body of citizens, trained by a 
good system of secondary education, is wanting to 
mediate between the extremes of the State. 

1. It is of the highest interest to every State that its 
professional classes should not be of that narrow, un- 
trained sort, which is always found when uneducated 
youth rush upon the study and practice of the Law, 
Medicine, Divinity, and Instruction. There is no 
greater blessing to a country than a class of superior 
lawyers, doctors, ministers, teachers, and journalists; 
and no greater blight upon public advancement than 
pretentious, ignorant bunglers in these posts of honor. 
To insure this, every Christian State has thought it 
wise to offer its aid, — if not for the means of profes- 
sional training, at least for that general superior culture 
of the whole man which makes the chief difference be- 
tween those who assume the honors and duties of pro- 
fessional life. 

2. It is especially important that a republican State 
should have, at call, a class of competent teachers for 
the common schools, in which all children may be 
trained for common citizenship. Without such a class 
there can be no security that the common school is a 
blessing. And without a care over the education and 
training of these teachers, the State can never be cer- 
tain that its purpose in establishing these schools will 
not be baffled by obstinacy and ignorance, by sectarian 
jealousy, — especially by the enemies of republican in- 



138 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

stitutions, who always drive at the children in a free 
State to pervert them from the way of liberty and light. 
So every State in general, and every republican Com- 
monwealth in particular, has found it necessary to 
establish, support, and supervise a system of superior 
education to train superior youth for the sacred office of 
instructor in its common schools. 

3. A republic, especially, needs a strong and numer- 
ous body of well-informed and reliable men and women, 
who shall stand in all social and public affairs between 
the great multitudes at the bottom and the few am- 
bitious, powerful and magnetic men who always seek to 
rule the Commonwealth. A State without such a class 
speedily comes to an end of republicanism and closes 
up into a despotism. Now, this middle class, which is 
the very soul of a free State, can only be developed 
from the masses ; and only where there is a public 
provision for the superior education of all who have the 
pith and persistence to take it, has it ever been found. 
Why cannot New England be dominated, like Ireland 
or Spain, by a succession of brilliant demagogues, each 
good for a revolution ? Because New England, in a 
larger degree than any other group of States, has made 
that public provision for the training of the superior 
middle class of society, which is the keystone of the 
arch in a republic. 

4. And even greater is the need, in a republican 
State, that there should be a numerous body of well- 
educated and well-trained women. It is the common- 
place of every debating society, that the mothers rule 
the nation. The mother who gives birth to, cherishes 
and rears the boy, teaches him to talk, to use his facul- 
ties, to think, worship, act in practical affairs, and, 
generally, is nearest him till he is ten years old, is a 



HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE STATE. 139 

power in the State that no other person can possibly 
become. Now, everybody knows that a nation full of 
ignorant, vulgar, untrained women must remain a nation 
of subjects to some imperial or ecclesiastical power. 
And everjHbody may know, who will study history with 
open eyes, that a nation whose women are educated by 
an infallible priesthood becomes a nation rent with the 
desperate struggle between free thought and a church 
that never changes in its attitude to mankind. The 
most powerful, though, perhaps, the least noticeable re- 
sult of our American system of free secondary educa- 
tion, is the constant elevation from the masses of a 
growing class of well-trained, thoughtful, patriotic 
Christian women, who prevent more evil in the republic 
than all the statesmen, and set in motion so many of 
the ideas and ideals that shape the policy of Senates 
and Presidents. 

The assertion that this work of the secondary and 
higher education, or the greater part of it, can be left 
to private ambition and enterprise, runs against all the 
experience of mankind. Private ambition and extra- 
ordinary genius or energy may impel a few to climb the 
steep and toilsome path that even a good secondary 
training is to ever}'' youth. But all experience in hu- 
man affairs demonstrates that where the State itself 
does nQt offer a constant invitation and stimulant by 
supplying, in whole or in part, the expense of such an 
education, its professional class, politicians, teachers, 
and mothers will fail of their fit culture, and the nation 
slide down on an ever-descending path to disorder and 
despotism. All States become powerful and famous in 
proportion as it is easy for the children of the whole 
people to climb the steep and rugged way of the 
superior training that lifts a man above his fellows. 



140 TALKS WITH TEACREBS. 



THE COMMON SCHOOLS & THEIR RIDERS. 



The great merit of the common schools is their com- 
monness. They deal with that primal development of 
mind, manners, and morals, which is the universal need 
of a free State. They impart that useful knowledge 
without which no American woman is fit to be married, 
much less to be an "old maid; " and no man is fit to 
vote. An Astor or Stewart, without the knowledge and 
discipline imparted by these schools, would be a public 
pest in proportion to the size of his fortune. A hod- 
carrier, ignorant and untrained in the common Ameri- 
can education, inevitably falls into the hands of his 
demagogue, who cheats or bullies him out of his man- 
hood. Even the education and discipline given by the 
free high school, apart from the small number of pupils 
fitted for college, is as essentially common as in the 
simplest primary. It is not a special training, but a 
continuation of that common discipline which qualifies 
for the intelligent conduct of ordinary American life, 
and lays the groundwork of the superior professional 
character. Only when we come to the normal school, 
and the professional departments of a few State univer- 
sities, chiefly dependent on national endowments of 
land, do we really touch upon the uncommon element 
in the people's school. 

The most subtle danger that threatens the common 
school, is always the presistent effort of a crowd of 
uneasy and one-sided people to switch it off the central 
track and run it as an uncommon school. Foremost 



COMMON SCHOOLS AND THEIR EIDERS. 141 

among these reformers is always a considerable body of 
the teachers. 

It has often been said that our estimate of the value 
of any department of knowledge is generally in pro- 
portion to our own proficiency ; and unusual acquire- 
ments are apt to breed an exaggerated sense of their 
own value. Dip in anywhere, from Maine to California, 
and you are apt to come upon an accomplished teacher 
in some of the upper reaches of the schools who is 
bringing to bear the whole power of a vigorous person- 
ality to making a specialty the distinction of the school. 
Many of our Western schools have been ridden nigh to 
death by the infuriate methematician, who has so 
hedged in the path of promotion with difficulties that 
thousands of girls have been frightened away from the 
high schools, and the common-sense, practical use of 
figures has been greatly hindered. There are schools in 
which the steam is turned on chiefly in the direction of 
hand-writing, slate-ruling, and drawing; a sort of 
" making clean the outside of the cup and platter," 
while the inside is filled with a mush of ignorance. 
Just now the study of German is the "old man of the 
sea" that rides the schools of Western cities, with 
grievous injustice to all who will not surrender to the 
cosmopolitan course of study. There are scores of 
teachers in New England who are trying to flood the 
high schools with a thin dilution of " English litera- 
ture " ; while the studies that wake up the waiting 
manhood and womanhood of pupils, from sixteen to 
twenty, are given the go-by. 

A superficial sort of "object lessons " has ridden many 
a crowd of children out to pasture and left them bewil- 
dered in the ten-acre-lot of miscellaneous and undi- 
gested information. We have seen schools where the 



142 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

rider was a certain airy liveliness in the children, as if 
keeping infants on their spiritual tiptoes were educa- 
tion. And so on to the end of the chapter. It is 
"easy as preaching" for an enthusiastic, one-sided 
teacher to capture her school and turn the great current 
of its life in the direction where she has found her most 
delightful culture. A despotic and powerful master can 
wheel about a corps of subordinates and a thousand 
children by his own scheme of educational evolution, 
till they almost appear like a thousand chips maneuver- 
ing about one obstinate block. 

Here is the call for a broad supervision of schools, by 
educators qualified through a generous culture and a 
sterling patriotic common-sense and sympathy with the 
masses, to keep the schools on the common track; 
restrain the enthusiasm of narrow specialists and aid the 
teachers in the difficult task of subordinating their per- 
sonal tastes to the general good. 

Great pains must be taken in the graded schools of 
cities to hold the teachers of music, drawing, gymnas- 
tics, sewing, firmly to their proper work. Of course, it 
is a trial to the experts who superintend these special- 
ties to stop any where this side of thorough artistic 
training. But there can be found a way to use these 
attractive studies for the common purposes of American 
life. It is doubtless best to place all studies, in primary 
and lower grammar schools, in charge of the teacher of 
the room ; reserving the time of the expert for the 
training of these teachers and a general oversight of 
the superior grades. 

A new rider of portentous aspect is the craze, in 
certain quarters, for what is called industrial education 
in the common schools. Assuming that the mechanio 
arts and the use of tools is identical with industry, 



COMMON SCHOOLS AND THEIR RIDERS. 143 

it would make every school-room a sort of workshop. 
Even in our greatest manufacturing State, this rider 
would compel more than half the pupils, and those the 
children of the people most heavily taxed, to divert a 
good portion of their time from the common education 
to which they are entitled, in order to further the special 
training of the children of the mechanics and opera- 
tives. Of course, the discipline of the hand is valuable 
to all; but some good things must be left to be taught 
at home or by special private instruction. And grati- 
fying as certain results in this direction may be to this 
class of school reformers, we believe the common-sense 
of the American people will hold the schools firmly to 
that commonness which is their only valid claim upon 
the support of the State. 

We are now threatened with a serious revolt of all the 
children of one church from the common schools, be- 
cause they will not accept the rider of an infallible 
scheme of moral and religious training. But if every 
person claimed the right to ride the common pony 
round the school-house ring, at the same time, we should 
have the old circus problem revived of a dozen small 
boys jointly and severally "bounced" over the head 
and the tail by the capers of the lively little beast. If 
our Archbishop has not found out that there is one 
morality common to Catholic, Protestant, Independent, 
and Jew, in Christian America, he fails of infallible 
wisdom to that extent. The people, in the long run, 
can be trusted to preserve this great, common realm of 
character training for their schools, and vigorously keep 
the uncommon things of the ecclesiastics in the infinite 
range of operation outside. 

We have no time now to speak of the new doctor who 
wants to ride his great physiological horse up the school- 



144 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

house steps ; the enterprising dentist who gnashes his 
teeth with rage because he cannot examine the mouth 
of every school-child; the elocutionist that burns to 
shriek "Maud M tiller" through every school-room; 
the temperance agent who only asks the privilege to 
make a stump speech on the play-ground ; the whole 
crowd of showmen, book agents, missionaries, etc., who 
drive at the schools with a pertinacity only known to 
the harassed school committee. Concerning all these 
riders, within and without, the one thing to be said, all 
the time, to the people who support the common school, 
is the pathetic negative of Mr. Weller, Sen., — " Samivel 
—don't." 



ATTENDANCE AT SCHOOL CONVENTIONS. 145 



SPEAKERS AND HEARERS IN SCHOOL CON- 
VENTIONS. 

The common-school institute has already been re- 
modeled, and, in comparison with its elder brother, the 
institute of a dozen years ago, may be called a labor- 
saving machine. It is difficult to see (Gail Hamilton 
to the contrary, notwithstanding) how abetter use could 
be made of two days and three evenings, with a hun- 
dred country teachers, than by Secretary Dickinson and 
his corps of experts in the recent institutes of Massa- 
chusetts. We hear famous things of some of the great 
meetings for the instruction of teachers, in New York 
and the Northwest. Indeed, the institute, in some of 
these States, is a veritable normal school on wheels. — 
one of those happy American combinations in education 
which strike dumb with astonishment our methodical 
school brethren from over the sea. We were once as- 
signed, as a member of the Cincinnati School Board, by 
its genial superintendent, Dr. John Hancock, to the 
.somewhat ticklish duty of piloting an English noble- 
man through the wonders of the "Paris of America." 
Our offer of service was met by the eager reply, " Show 
us your short cuts. I hear that in Cincinnati you 
change a live hog to a barrel of pork in two minutes, 
and teach little German children to speak good English 
in six weeks." All the outlying glories of the Queen 
City were wasted upon our earl on his travels in pursuit 
of " short cuts." 

We are afraid our " noble lord " would fight shy of 
the average school convention, East and West. It 



146 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

really seems as if this were about the last end of Amer- 
ican school-life to be reconstructed in the interest of 
brevity, point, and general efficiency. The season of 
these pleasant gatherings, — county, State, national, — 
is upon us. With the most vivid recollections of num- 
berless delightful "seasons" in the good company that 
swarms at these mighty assemblages, we yet venture to 
suggest that the " new education " requires some modi 
fication in the ordinary way of their management. 

First : Let it be understood that a school convention 
in distinction from an institute, is an assembly of teach- 
ers and friends of education for general inspiration in 
educational work, andsocial communion. It is absolutely 
impossible to hold a body so restless as one of these 
great audiences to any connected work of pedagogic in- 
struction, or even to a profound and sustained disserta- 
tion on any topic of radical interest. Joseph Cook says, 
" An audience of teachers is the most select audience in 
America." But even a body as select as the five hun- 
dred superior men and women who crowd the biggest 
church in a Yankee village, at the county convention, 
is a great deal more interested, each in taking the meas- 
ure of her fellow-man or woman, than in listening to 
any human voice. But, strange to say, we make no 
real provision to satisfy the social craving of such a 
body for more intimate acquaintance. We have not 
forgotten how, as a boy, we used to lie at full length, 
head propped on elbow, in the great square pew at the 
northwest summit of the gallery in the mighty old vil- 
lage church, all through sermon-time, looking straight 
down into the faces of the "treble " and "counter," and 
wonder if we should ever be accounted worthy to speak 
to this brace of divinities who condescended to " praise 
God in singing " at the head of the choir. Our observa- 



A TTENDANCE A T SCHOOL CON VENTIO .VS. 147 

tions from the platform confirm the suspicion that the 
average convention audience has far more interest in 
pedagogy incarnate in Hagar, Parker, or the scores of 
their bright-eyed disciples, or, even, the good old lady 
schoolma'am who, at seventy, still comes up to the feast 
as frisky as the last graduate of Oswego, than in a phil- 
osophical analysis of the question, " How much does a 
five-year-old child know ? " 

Now, the first condition of a teachers' convention 
is to get these eager hundreds of good people really to- 
gether. The most indifferent country girl school-mis- 
tress can get from her Journal of Education, Pri- 
mary Teacher, or any of a dozen excellent books on 
pedagogy, as much as anybody really knows about that 
mystery of the ages, — the soul of a little child. What 
she, alike with the wisest school-man wants, is real con- 
tact with somebody ivho has actually taught and trained 
boys and girls with success. A chat of five minutes in 
a corner, reenforced by the magic of a sympathetic voice 
and a beaming face, will open for him or her a prospect 
that will reconstruct the whole landscape of the coming 
school term. Nowhere in the world do good people 
make love so fast, or strike such lasting impressions 
into the very depths of each other's souls as when a crowd 
of teachers comes up from the toils and tears and mighty 
strivings of five hundred school-rooms, each calling out 
from the deeps to the neighbor, " What shall I do to be 
saved ? " To compel such an assembly to sit, hour after 
hour, listening to a series of essays upon the topics that* 
may be selected by a committee of experts, is the last 
device of pedantry. These men and women want each 
other, at that particular time, more than all things else ; 
and how to get the most of each other, in four sessions, 
is the problem yet unsolved in the school convention. 



148 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

But one thing is evident : One whole session of even 
a one-day's convention should be given to letting loose 
these hungry and thirsty souls among each other. 
Why not, in the afternoon, throw open the largest va- 
cant assembly-room in the village, and give your crowd 
the opportunity to u have free course, run, and be glori- 
fied " for three golden hours ? Then bring out your 
singers and your readers for an occasional relief to the 
music of tongues. Bring flowers, and whatever the 
whole - hearted hospitality of the village may offer. 
That session will be remembered when "new methods" 
have evaporated and experts are dust. 

Second : Let the program for the working sessions 
be given to work. Observe the simplest rule of good 
school-keeping ; — to begin on the moment and stop at the 
end. Your assembly of teachers and friends wants two 
things : first, a real discussion of the most interesting 
educational topic going, in the region covered by the 
convention ; second, to see as many of the foremost 
teachers of the district as can be seen, and hear a few 
minutes', not of theory but of experience-talk, from each 
on that point. Introduce the subject by a concise pa- 
per, the length of a good sermon, from a speaker of un- 
doubted ability to reach " the most select audience in 
America." Then call up, for the remainder of the 
three hours' session, a score of the leading teachers, 
warned beforehand, to give in a talk, not exceeding ten 
minutes, as much of what they actually " know " on 
this theme as may be. Hold every speaker to time, and 
let motion be the law of the session. It may be desir- 
able to leave half an hour open to volunteer speeches, 
of five minutes each, at the close of the program. 

Third : The evening of the convention should be 
utilized for the waking-up of the whole people, — not 






A TTE.NDA NCE A T SCU OL CON VEN TIONS. 149 

less important now than the training of teachers. An 
introductory lecture, of moderate lerigth, followed by a 
series of talks from eminent speakers, of different pro- 
fessions, will make an impression that no political meet- 
ing can hope to rival. There is no public listening, 
now-a-days, more eager and critical than by the crowded 
audience that invariably comes out to hear, when it is 
assured of common-sense, earnestness, and eloquence 
on the platform of the school-convention. A day thus 
begun by the flitting of the teachers from half a hun- 
dred towns ; revolving through sessions each distinct 
in method, all united in the idea ; closed by a night 
of such hospitality as our people are glad to extend, 
will be an era in the life of many a teacher, and never 
forgotten by anybody. 



150 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



TOO THIN. 

There seems to be a theory of education on its trav- 
els, up and down the country, that regards the teacher 
as a skilled workman, trained to impart certain items of 
elementary knowledge, develop a certain order of " intel- 
lectual " faculties, and, in due time, bring forth a youth 
or maiden well instructed in the special duties of its 
special position in life, with the happy faculty of being 
content therewith. The advocates of thi3 gospel of 
common-school education reduced to its lowest terms, 
are very positive in regard to the importance of keeping 
within the rigid limit of a fit education for the masses. 
On no account must we tread on the toes of the Fam- 
ily, which has certain inalienable rights the schoolmis- 
tress is bound to respect. The church also exists to 
manage the religious side of humanity, and the school- 
master must keep clear of that. Of course, the common 
school must not interfere with politics, or fill the boys 
with any impracticable aspirations for the presidency, 
or the girls with a longing for the occupation of a pal- 
ace on the Boston Back-bay. Then it must be borne 
in mind that scientific training and university life is a 
world of its own with which the common herd inter- 
meddleth not, and the common-school teacher may only 
contemplate as she now and then looks at the moon 
through the great telescope in the college observatory. 
Above all things, the education of the common people 
must be " practical." And being practical means, not 
interfering with the claim of any of these special inter- 
ests which stand up as tall and as obstinate as the ever- 



TOO TniN. 151 

lasting hills all over the landscape of American life. 

By the time the anxious teacher is through with the 
demands of this type of school-keeping, he finds himself 
in the same plight as the ambitious youngster who left 
his native village in pursuit of his fortune, and found 
himself, at the end of his first year's experimenting, 
the conductor of a gravel-train on the Hudson-river rail- 
way, under strict instructions to "keep out of the way 
of everything else on the road." Just what a "prac- 
tical education" for the masses in the common school 
will mean after the family, the church, the university, 
the politicians, and the upper ten have had each its 
own sweet will and way with each pupil, is the thing 
which, in the expressive language of Lord Dundrear}^ 
"no fellow can find out." Governor Wise replied to 
the demand of the United States Government for the per- 
son of John Brown, that, " When Virginia was through 
with hira, the United States could have what was 
left." What will be left to the common-school teacher, at 
the end of all these rival demonstrations upon the child, 
would seem to be fitly expressed in the vernacular of 
the schoolboy, — "too thin for anything." Indeed, un- 
der such a theory, the only vocation of the teacher of 
public schools would seem to be a sort of mechanical 
tattooing of the surface of the scholar's mind with useful 
knowledge, backed by a vigorous injunction to "re- 
member the rock from which he was hewn," and on no 
account get uneasy with what the leading authorities in 
his particular beat may declare his "destiny in life." 

Of course, there are not many teachers who reason this 
all out and go to their daily task with one eye always open 
to the signal of the express-train thundering down their 
road. But one of the worst results of the persistent as- 
saults upon the peo pie's schools during the past years has 



152 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

been, a mischievous habit of timidity in the average 
teacher which is always fearing to overstep limits aud 
get out of the true sphere of public-school work. There 
are schools so intimidated by ecclesiastical or atheistic 
arrogance that the teachers are almost afraid to assert 
that man has a soul, or the universe a God, lest some- 
body who believes more or less than hiinself should 
throw a stone through the school-house window. It is 
pitiful to behold the lack of intelligent and decisive 
courage, both in the instruction and discipline of schools, 
which is so often a paralysis at the very sources of our 
school-life, changing the schoolmistress from a dignified 
public official of the State to the cringing maid-servant 
of half-a-dozen mistresses, each threatening displeasure 
for the assertion of her womanhood. The trouble is 
often aggravated by an ignorant, incompetent, or time- 
serving school board, made up of politicians on the 
lookout for danger-signals on their journey to office. 
We know towns, — even cities, — where the public 
schools are being undermined and made well-nigh use- 
less by this fatal want of self-assertion by school author- 
ities and instructors. It is this wretched superficiality, 
this feeble fussing with great masses of children and 
youth, with the interminable worriment that always 
comes when a body of teachers is trying to please 
everybody, that, more than anything else, accounts for 
the discouragement of so many of our best American 
people with the poor outcome of public-school life. 
Nothing is practical which is not, at fi? % st, radical ; and 
this style of timid manipulation of the surface intellect 
of the average child is the very Devil's receipt for turn- 
ing it out, not only an unpractical, but an impracticable 
American citizen. Of course, the old country district 
school, where the master was master, and carried his 



TOO THIX. 153 

points even at the risk of a batch of broken heads and 
a stand-up fight once a quarter, was better than the 
spectacle of a school of specters, fencing in vacuum with 
weapons of moonshine. Better let the cardinal have 
his way and hammer something positive, like a pile 
driven down to hard-pan, into the soul of young Patrick 
and Bridget, than bring them up in a school whose 
teacher needs the eyes of Argus to watch her critics, 
and handles them with mittens so soft that they never 
find out the reality of anything. 

The cure for this pestilent nonsense is the plain up-and- 
down statement that the people's common school is the 
people's university of American citizenship. For two 
hundred and fifty years the American people have 
steadily worked toward a free Republic of the style 
that is now becoming the leading power of the western 
continent and the political schoolmaster of the world. 
On the way to this consummation the American people 
has run over about everything that has planted itself, 
with an air of infallible occupancy, across its track. A 
score of institutions and interests, accounted divine and 
immortal by their haughty advocates, have bitten the 
dust before the conquering march of this victorious 
people. And that man must be a poor student of Amer- 
ican history who fancies the American people will sub- 
mit to the destruction, the undermining, or the par- 
alyzing of that system of free instruction of American 
children which has " grown with their growth and 
strengthened with their strength," and is now the very 
citadel of life in the Republic. The people believe that 
if the Republic can be sustained and made as vital in 
every State as it now is in the foremost States, all 
wholesome interests will find themselves better off than 
ever before in this world. Family Church, Politics 

H 



154 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

good Society, the University, Literature, Art, the Na- 
tional Industries, can only attain their highest devel- 
opment in such a nationality as we, the people, are 
making of this Union. Therefore, with all due respect 
for the rights of each and all these essential interests, 
the people propose to make their education in the free 
school deep and broad and high and rich enough to 
turn out a generation of youth fit to become good citi- 
zens of such a Nationality. Whatever method of in- 
struction or discipline of scholars ; whatever training, 
support, and protection of teachers ; whatever taxation, 
even to the point of self-sacrifice, is essential to this su- 
preme result, will be demanded and sustained by the 
ruling majority, that always finds out and destroys 
every enemy to the Republic. 

The best policy for the school committee is always 
the policy that looks to this result. The resolute, in- 
telligent, wise committee-man who " endureth unto the 
end " will always be indorsed by the final verdict of the 
people. The noble teacher who stands up to the full 
stature, not of a crotchety personality, but of manly or 
womanly professional dignity in the schoolroom, even 
though persecuted in one city and compelled to flee 
into another, will have not gone through many States 
of this Union before the kingdom of the New Educa- 
tion will have come. What we now want is the clos- 
ing up of the intelligence and Christian character and 
patriotic resolve of every American community to make 
the common school the best thing possible ; put into it 
the most competent teacher; make up the train and go 
ahead, with fair notice of everything to keep off the 
track. There is no danger that any true religion, or 
anything else really true, beautiful, practical, and good 
in our American life will be harmed by such education 



TOO THIN. 155 

of American children as the people are demanding in 
their own university, the free common school. The 
verdict " too thin " has already gone forth against this 
caricature of school-keeping of which we have spoken ; 
and the common school must be made strong enough to 
grow the strong men and women the Republic now 
demands. 



156 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



KEEP THE BEST SCHOOL. 



One of the most active ward politicians in a large city 
in New York made a pilgrimage to Washington, thirty 
years ago, in quest of an office from the incoming 
President he had worked vigorously to elect. After a 
week of dangling ahout the departments, he awoke one 
day to the solemn fact that none of his little city wires 
were long enough to touch the great man besieged in 
the White House. One Monday morning he was seen 
streaking for the rail-way station, carpet-bag in hand. 
" Where now, my friend ? " shouted a voice from across 
the street. The sharp reply came back from a man too 
much in a hurry to turn his head, — "Straight home, — to 
keep tavern like thunder and lightning!" Just that 
thing he did, for ten years ; made his hotel the most 
comfortable place and himself the best landlord, and 
one of the most substantial citizens in western New 
York. By that time, Abraham Lincoln, in the White 
House, was a good deal more worried to find good men 
to put in office than our old friend, ten years before, to 
get an appointment. This time the office came to the 
man, — a place far more important than the ambitious 
ward politician had aspired after in his wildest dreams. 

The educational public is convulsed with the squab- 
bles of a great crowd of immature school-men, jealous 
to intolerance from their lack of maturity. There are 
good people who " flare up " at the very notion that 
any parent should seriously prefer a private to a public 
school, or even Harvard or Yale to the new western 



KEEP THE BEST SCHOOL. 157 

State university. There are solemn Yankee professors 
and " lady principals " of girls' academies who jump 
to the conclusion that every' co-educated girl must be a 
hoyden and is probably flirting with the Adonis of the 
adjoining bench. Herr Eckle, of Cincinnati, would 
put even the Almighty out of the school-room, — a con- 
flict in which Herr Eckle will probably come out second. 
Across the way, Archbishop Purcell has brought finan- 
cial wreck upon his province and put himself into 
spiritual Coventry by a twenty years' crusade to force 
an infallible church into the public school-house. So 
does the war rage ; a war of different systems and rival 
methods, each with its army of partizans led by the 
most intolerant of all popes ; a great schoolmaster 
who has plowed thirty years in one furrow, and sunk 
himself so deep into the bowels of the earth that he 
mistakes the sloping sides of his own little educational 
canon for the boundaries of the educational universe. 

Not that there is any lack of plenty of work for all 
in fighting the old battle of intelligence, morality and 
freedom against the swarming host that still wages the 
war in behalf of " chaos and old night." And each 
party, in its way, is doing vigorous service against the 
common enemy. But none of them can deny itself the 
luxury of an occasional raid upon its rival. So the 
conflict proceeds, like a naval engagement in which a 
powerful fleet, ranged in a circle, discharges its outer 
broadside, at long range, upon the surrounding foe, 
while its interior broadsides are poured, with murderous 
effect, upon itself. Just how long the schools of the 
Eepublic can "fight it out on that line " without sink- 
ing the very cause of liberty, light, and religion itself, 
might be a fit topic for one of those cantankerous dis- 
cussions that, now and then, rend the vitals of the 



158 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

school convention, and make plain, sensible men almost 
despair of the human race. 

Now, two or three things may be safely assumed by 
American school-men of all sorts. First, that the 
American people is the most intelligent in all matters 
concerning public x wisdom, freedom, and morality of any 
people upon earth; andean safely be trusted, in the 
long run, to find out the most effective way of educat- 
ing the children into good citizenship. Second, that 
the aforesaid people is a highly interested listener and 
spectator of this war of the school-men, is hearing 
arguments, interviewing experts, and testing results in 
ways incredible to pedants, but perfectly comprehensi- 
ble to patriots and statesmen. Third, that, meanwhile, 
the present generation of American children is growing 
like the grass and leaves in early May ; and since they 
cannot await the judicial decision on the questions at 
issue, the best people, every where, will expect every 
teacher to keep the best school. 

Just what that old tavern-keeper in western .New 
York did, in his line, is the gospel of every teacher, 
from the president of Harvard College to the feeblest 
" Sister " in the least parochial school of New Mexico. 

The centre of all interest in education for every 
American parent is the best school for his children, dur- 
ing the next fifteen years. The best school in any com- 
munity will inevitably attract the most substantial 
people and the most hopeful scholars. Every teacher, of 
course, is privileged to investigate, experiment, discuss 
in that all-out-doors realm, — the Best Education. But 
unless, meanwhile, that teacher keeps school " like 
thunder and lightning "; goes forth with every morn- 
ing sun arrayed in the full strength and beauty of the 
uttermost that God has given him to do; the people will 



KEEP THE BEST SCHOOL. 159 

leave him with his theories, will laugh at his little con- 
vention-fights, vote him a pedant or an impracticable, 
and place their children with the man or woman who, 
in this particular year of our Lord, 1880, with method 
or without method, actually keeps the best school. 

So, dear friends, let us bear in mind the solemn duty 
of to-day; — to do our level best, according to our pres- 
ent light, with every little child or big student intrusted 
to our charge. The human race is in the hands of 
Providence, and, by our faithful efforts, the light will 
break in through the ages to come as fast as our twi- 
light vision can bear it. But it is comforting to know 
that the most valuable contribution to pedagogic science 
is one more good school. Speculation is vain and phi- 
losophy all "in the air," until incarnate in a school that 
actually turns out men and women of whom man and 
God are not ashamed. 

And, sometimes, the most unpretending girl, in a 
backwoods district, amid a little group of all sorts and 
sizes of "school material," by the simple might of an 
unselfish love and the mother-wit that goes without 
groping to the heart of things and of men, will do, 
without knowing it, something so deep and wise and 
beautiful that even the average State convention will 
sit, for an hour, in peaceful humility at her feet while 
she tries in vain to tell her secret. Do not be afraid 
that your school will be overlooked, if 'best' in any- 
thing. There is an underground telegraph, with a sta- 
tion in the heart of every wise, righteous, and patriotic 
mother in America ; and every such mother-heart feels 
a throb when a new good thing is done in any school- 
room in the land. 

Our people, every year, believe more obstinately in 
the full American system of free education ; but they 



ICO TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

will not risk their children in a poor school because it is 
free. Every man, whose opinion is worth attention, de- 
mands more practical, persistent character-training, 
according to the method of the great Teacher in that 
old "summer school" among the hills and lakes of 
Palestine. But the most zealous church-woman who is, 
besides, a woman of culture and common-sense,will not 
send her daughter to a poor school, though housed in a 
palace, advertised with all pomp and circumstance, and 
indorsed by a string of eminent names a mile long. It 
would seem a little superfluous for eminent teachers to 
waste breath in demonstrating what cannot be done in 
the school-room. The best methods of education have 
a way of prevailing in the very face and eyes of the 
most eminent authorities. If only each of us would 
give himself, to-day and altogether, to keeping the best 
school, according to the light he now has ; possessing 
his soul, all the while, in as much patience and charity 
and hopefulness as may be, it will be all the better for 
the dear children, and the truth of all our systems and 
methods will appear, in God's own time. 



GOOD READING. iqi 



GOOD READING. 

In our youth we remember to have been, for years, 
on a very short allowance of good reading. We did 
not read more industriously than half the studious 
school-boys of to-day, and the country town in Massa- 
chusetts where we lived contained an exceptional group 
of superior families. But, as early as the age of twelve 
we had absolutely read every book in the town of any 
possible interest to an inquiring youth ; and the advent 
of a new doctor, who brought the first copy of Shake- 
speare and a small library of readable books, relieved 
the stagnation of the situation. But we are inclined 
to think this very deprivation a good providence. Be- 
fore sixteen, we had been compelled to read, over and 
over again, Addison, Dr. Johnson, Shakespeare, Spark's 
American Biography, and Harper's Family Library; 
with the novels of Cooper and Miss Sedgwick; one 
volume of Channing ; and, once a week, the respectable 
Boston Weekly Messenger, containing the most celebra- 
ted Congressional speeches at an interesting political 
crisis. All told, before the age of sixteen, our reading 
was shut up to less than a hundred substantial volumes ; 
but these were read, pondered, and " inwardly di- 
gested," and have never been forgotten. 

Outside of a few towns and cities, this was a favor- 
able specimen of the reading opportunity of a stay-at- 
home boy or girl, in New-England, forty years ago. 
The chief reliance of a young person fond of reading 
was the private library of the parson, or an occasional 
cultivated family. The day of village libraries had not 



162 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

come in, and the weekly debating society, with its in- 
troductory lecture, the germ of our present lecture 
system, was the only literary club. Henry Wilson 
read through the entire library of a country minister, 
in New Hampshire, while a "hired man" on a farm, 
before the age of twenty-one. One of the most charming 
of the female poets of New England was brought up on 
the old volume of. " elegant poetical extracts," which 
some of us remember as the best collection of English 
poetry a generation ago. But out of that intense and 
persistent reading of a few great books was wrought a 
culture, both of the appreciative and creative faculty, 
which has stood the country well in hand through the 
opening period of American education and authorship. 
For there can be no doubt, the men and women who 
have left the strongest impression of original American 
power upon our country, hitherto, have been trained 
chiefly in the school of American life in connection with 
this prodigious reading of a few dozen books that sug- 
gested the whole circle of literary culture. 

Those days are forever gone, and it is a profitless 
use of time to scold or weep over the fact that our chil- 
dren live in a new mental heaven and earth. As well 
might an ocean-steamer, in the mid- Atlantic, complain 
of a superabundance of water, as the teacher or parent 
rail against the deluge of books that now threatens to 
engulf his lively charge. Our children and young peo- 
ple cannot be shut up in a mental closet, after the pat- 
tern of the fathers ; and the attempt to educate an 
American youth on mediaeval principles develops only 
a novel phase of modern mental stolidity or brutality. 
For a modern American who, on principle, ignores the 
English and American literature and the European 
science and philosophy of the last half-century, is by 



GOOD BEADING. 163 

no means, the kind of scholar that existed in that far- 
off day, but a nondescript ; as truly out of place as 
Fulton, with his original steamboat, in the wake of the 
Daniel Drew plowing its midnight path from Albany 
to New York. 

The thing we want to save for our children is tha 
habit of intense, patient reading of the world's few 
good books, or of the best that fall in the way of any 
particular child. Such books are still rare, and the 
boy who has climbed a few of them need not tire his 
legs tramping through the vast realm of foot-hills over- 
looked from their summits. There is but one way now 
in which this can be accomplished. If a child, at a 
proper age, can be thoroughly introduced to one real 
author, led through his books and brought into vital 
communion with the "hiding place of his power," he 
will not be tempted to fill himself with husks ; but will 
go on making the acquaintance of other books and au- 
thors of the same sort. It seems to us, that a good 
deal of the instruction in English literature fails at 
this point. A pupil is not introduced to English Lit- 
erature by committing to memory a compendious his 
tory of English literature, or even a weekly exercise in 
repeating poetical " gems." On the contrary, this sort 
of instruction lays the foundation of that hop-skip-and- 
juinp style of going through authors which leaves the 
mind of the reader flippant, shallow, and dry ; trifling 
with the surfaces of culture, untouched by the influ- 
ence of the noblest minds. It may be well to give a 
high-school or academical class a chart of English au- 
thorship, with a few light-houses and buoys indicating 
the great channels of thought that fertilize the differ- 
ent periods of English and American history. But 
this is properly the work of the history class and 



164 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

nothing is really done for the student in literature till 
some author of commanding power is taken in hand 
and read thoroughly by teacher and class, till the dull- 
est soul in it comes to know, in some measure, the 
power of a great book. If but one thing can be done, 
let it be this. Better give your whole school one ses- 
sion a week with your most accomplished teacher, in the 
thorough reading of one great author suitable for the 
class, than fill their minds with a senseless catalogue of 
authors and titles relieved by a few extracts ; like a 
dull suit of linsey-woolsey illuminated by the dreary 
glimmer of an occasional brass button sewed upon the 
homely suit of melancholy grey. 

Every good teacher should begin early to teach her 
children how to read the morning newspaper in fifteen 
minutes, and the weekly journal or magazine in an 
hour. Otherwise, our young people will be inevitably 
swamped in a whelming ocean of journalism, and never 
find the time to read a good book. Half-a-dozen men 
and women are the life of American journalism ; and 
the magazinists worth reading can be counted on one's 
fingers. The bright youth who is initiated, at fourteen, 
into the art of disemboweling his newspaper and maga- 
zine in the least time and the most decisive way, has 
gained an art more valuable than a college diploma for 
the vital uses of life. 



THE NEW OBSCURANTISTS. 165 



THE NEW OBSCURANTISTS. 

There is an evident determination in several quarters 
to make things lively in the public schools. Of this we 
should not complain. The American common school, 
like all things American, is new, somewhat crude, de- 
pendent largely on local prejudice and popular intelli- 
gence for its administration, and dealing with a most 
excitable and turbulent race of youngsters of various 
races and nationalities, born into a revolutionary pe- 
riod. Of course, there is ample room for criticism, 
even for sharp comment, and for large reformation in 
this the most characteristic sphere of American life. 
There are few intelligent and patriotic observers who 
cannot suggest improvements ; although it is the high- 
est task of administrative wisdom to organize reform. 
It has been the policy of the author to welcome any 
suggestion made in a good spirit for the advancement 
of popular education ; for even an impracticable theory 
may contain the germ of a valuable idea. The teach- 
ers and school-men do well to keep their ears wide open 
to this Babel of criticism and comment ; to hear, u pon- 
der, and inwardly digest" all that may be said; with a 
heart fixed on the highest welfare of the children they 
are set to train and teach. 

But there is one class of critics of our popular schools 
who certainly try the patience of every fair-minded 
school-man. We refer to the new sect of cultivated 
obscurantists who, for the past few years, have been fill- 
ing the columns of some of our magazines and journals 
with a passionate and indiscriminating denunciation of 



166 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

our public-school life and a wholesale and scornful criti- 
cism of the intelligence, manners, and morals of Ameri- 
can children and youth. It is true, no American man 
of letters, scholar, scientist, or publicist, of first-rate 
reputation has appeared in this company. The men 
and women who thus offer themselves as the apostles 
of a sweeping reformation, are known chiefly by their 
success as specialists, often in regions where they could 
observe little of public-school affairs. But what this 
fraternity lacks in knowledge is made up in animus. 
Our republican society is a thronging wilderness of 
facts and events, and it is easy enough for a ready 
writer, with an animus against republican society, to 
marshall a host of statistics to prove that Young Amer- 
ica is on the high road to perdition, and the public- 
school master is the champion mischief-maker of the 
day. The characteristic of the new obscurantism is a 
fanatical belief in the infallibility of so-called " ex- 
perts ; " really of a self-elected new American aristoc- 
racy of "culture;" and a corresponding contempt for 
the whole idea of popular cultivation of which the pub- 
lic school is the outcome. This understood, a good 
deal that appears in this quarter can be estimated at 
its real value. 

No man, on the whole, so well represents this un- 
happy crowd as Mr. Eichard Grant White. In his 
own way, Mr. White has gained an honorable reputa- 
tion as a sympathetic critic of old English literature, a 
lively delineator of modern British life, and a persistent 
fighter in the mighty war about " words " which rages in 
the philological quarter of our university life. But when 
he offers himself as a critic on American society and 
our system of public education, the effect is like the 
sudden appearance of an irritable scholar, exasperated 



THE NEW OBSCURANTISTS. 167 

by the racket of a street full of noisy school-children, 
bursting from his study-door and firing, right and left, 
a shower of missiles, including the dictionary and the 
ink-stand, to the infinite diversion of the boisterous 
crowd. His recent articles in the North American 
Review and the New York Times are simply the pas- 
sionate scolding of a crotchety man of letters, just in 
from his European tour, provoked by the discomforts 
and disgusts of American society. Their only valuable 
quality is their revelation of the animus that is the soul 
of the new obscurantism ; and this, stripped of its dis- 
guise of a literary, scientific, and refined dialect, is sim- 
ply the old faith in the infallibility of a class and the 
sovereign contempt for the possibilities of the people, 
which has been the one implacable and Protean enemy 
of American society, from the beginning even to our 
day. 

Mr. White, in the North American Review, he gins by 
a characteristic history of the public school. In the 
true spirit of metropolitan conceit, he dates the real es- 
tablishment of the present system from the year 1842, 
when the city of New York was compelled to give up 
the rickety machine by which one Protestant sect had 
monopolized its education, the Public-School Society, 
and fall into line with the great common-school system 
of the Empire State. Our critic seems never to have 
heard of Horace Mann, of Barnard, and Paige, and 
Lewis, and Guilford, who years before had led the 
Northern American people to establish the improved 
common school from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, 
leaving a few obstinate, 'exceptional communities, like 
the cities of Albany and New York, to fall in at their 
leisure. Mr. White is one of the last "relicts" of that 
venerable band of mourners who cursed Governor 



168 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

Seward so heartily for his public-school reforms ; and 
he now parades his rusty weeds to a new generation, 
as the latest fashion of a new school of culture. The 
good people of New York will now learn, for the first 
time, that the Hon. William Tweed was the apostle of 
this new heresy, the metropolitan public school ! 

Equally absurd is the use made of Mr. Walton's Re- 
port of the Norfolk County Examination, enlarging on 
the reckless declaration of Mr. Charles Francis Adams, 
Jr., that the schools " went to pieces " under the test. 
Mr. White accepts as gospel every statement from every 
quarter that impeaches the value of our public-school 
education. What " comes from so many quarters must 
be true." But who are these "competent observers" 
who pronounce our schools a failure ? Certainly not 
the superior teachers, the most intelligent school 
committee-men, the most celebrated experts from for- 
eign lands ; the people who most carefully measure 
the state of popular intelligence, the increasing in- 
terest iu all departments of good culture, the condition 
of those communities where the schools have been most 
faithfully worked, the political poise of the responsible 
majority of the country during the past twenty years. 
Not these ; but a miscellaneous crowd, largely ignorant 
of the real condition of the people, largely prejudiced, 
and altogether unable to prove its wholesale assertion. 
The Norfolk examination simply proved, what every 
good school-man knows, that a country district school 
taught by untrained teachers, without responsible super- 
vision, is not a grand success. No school in Norfolk 
County, well taught and supervised, u went to pieces." 
The loose charge of a" few West Point professors and 
army officers, of a decline in popular intelligence inferred 
from examinations for admission to that school, has 



THE NEW OBSCURANTISTS. 169 

been so effectually answered by Superintendent Rick- 
off, that even Mr. White would have not referred to it 
had he once read the refutation. Indeed the only thing 
apparent here is the animus. Every such assertion, 
however vague, unauthorized, malicious, "must be true," 
because popular education is a humbug only second to 
republican government. 

Next, Mr. White becomes philosophical. Education 
he defines, " the acquiring of such knowledge as can be 
got in schools and from books ; " and proceeds to a furi- 
ous denial that such education is essential either to wor- 
thy manhood or good government. Who has said it is ? 
No public school-man in America would risk his repu- 
tation on such a pitiful definition of ' education.' The 
obtaining of knowledge either from books or teachers 
is neither the first nor the second aim of the public 
school. More than half the work in any good school is 
the training of character, morals, and manners. A 
large part of the remaining half of the public school- 
master's task is to awaken the love of truth, train the 
faculties and expand the mental horizon for its acquire- 
ment. The knowledge obtained in the most complete 
course of schooling, including the university, could be 
imparted to a prepared mind in two or three years. 
But the training in character, in mental discipline, in 
that mental rectitude which lies at the foundation of 
all culture and makes knowledge a blessing, is the slow 
and difficult work of years. " Ignorance his no rela- 
tion to vice" says Mr. White. What we call ignorance 
is almost invariably found in connection with an indif- 
ference to truth, a contempt for knowledge, a supreme 
self-conceit, and a narrow mental horizon. There are 
many things called ' culture' which do not touch the 
root of the matter by awakening and training the love 



170 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

of truth. Such culture deserves all that is said against 
it. But the schooling that takes the average American 
ignoramus and sends him out the kind of boy that the 
majority of our faithful public-school scholars become, 
is one of the most powerful agencies in the cause of in- 
telligence, good morals and good citizenship. Here 
again comes in the animus. The popular American 
notion that ignorance is dangerous to the republic must 
be branded as a contemptible prejudice. Our philoso- 
pher affirms that poverty is the mother of vice ; the 
fruitful parent of all the follies and diabolisms of soci- 
ety. What a mistake, then, in Omniscience to raise up 
as the Redeemer of mankind " the son of man," who 
"had not where to lay his head." Mr. White need 
not leave the island of Manhattan to learn that, not 
poverty, but the unhallowed love of money and its God- 
less use is " the root of all evil." And of all deadly 
weapons wielded by godless wealth, the ignorance of 
thousands of people in that great city is the most effect- 
ive against the peace of the State. 

But the final absurdity is still to come. Mr. White 
has fallen upon a pamphlet by the Hon. Zachary Mont- 
gomery of California, which proves the case against the 
.public-school system "as undeniably as the truth of 
Newton's theory of gravitation," by astronomical calcu- 
lation. " The census returns show that crime, immo- 
rality, and insanity are greater in proportion to popula- 
tion in those communities which have been long under 
the influence of the public-school system, than they are 
in those which have been without it." Then follows 
an elaborate contrast between the six New England 
States and the old six Atlantic Southern States, based 
on the census of 1860. Mr. White would have been 
spared the peril of his indorsement of this preposterous 



THE NEW OBSCURANTISTS. 171 

document had he taken the pains to consult the report 
of Mr. Carroll D. Wright, chief of Massachusetts Bu- 
reau of Statistics of Labor, in the Annual Report of 
the Massachusetts Board of Education, 1879. In this 
admirable pamphlet, which should be in the hands of 
every American teacher, Mr. Wright subjects this for- 
midable array of statistics to a thorough examination, 
and demolishes every inference drawn from them so 
completely that no serious answer has been attempted. 
First it is shown, by the testimony of Gen Walker, Su- 
perintendent of Census, that neither in 18G0 nor in 
1870 were there any reliable national statistics of pau- 
perism and crime. Second, this estimate is utterly 
misleading, as to crimes, from the great dissimilarity 
of the criminal code in the two sections. There were 
fifty offenses known to Massachusetts law in 1860, un- 
known to the criminal law of Virginia. More than 54 
percent, of commitments to prison in Massachusetts, 
in 1860, were for crimes which in Virginia would have 
been punished only by fine, and not have appeared in 
prison statistics. Third, a thorough analysis of New 
England pauperism, lunacy, and crime places the vast 
burden of it to the account of the untaught foreign pop- 
ulation that fills its manufactoring towns, and even in 
its second generation can only be partially affected by 
the common school. There is no bottom to this absurd 
theory, as set forth by Mr. White and the anti-school 
statisticians. And no one has more completely knocked 
the wind out of this style of assertion than the honored 
Superintendent of Schools for Virginia, Dr. Euffner. 
Yet, the sect of obscurantists will still go on, quoting 
the visionary theories and parading the misleading 
figures of Dabney, Montgomery, and the rest. It is, 
again, the animus. 



172 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

What Las Mr. White to propose as a remedy for the 
mischief -making American common schools ? Nothing 
but a retreat upon the system of stingy State support 
of a meagre elementary instruction for people too poor 
to buy it for themselves ; essentially the plan of some 
of our Southern States for the common people, before 
the war. But our reformer again is too late. Every 
Southern State, within the past ten years, has repudi- 
ated that plan and planted itself squarely on the Amer- 
ican public school. Every civilized country to-day is 
out of sight of his panacea. This system of popular 
education has been kicked down the back-stairs by the 
common consent of Christendom. The trouble with 
Mr. Richard Grant White, as with this whole sect of 
cultivated obscurantists, of which he is the prophet, is 
that he has just been awakened out of sleep by the 
mighty stir of the new republic getting itself together 
to posess a new continent and inaugurate the new or- 
der of human affairs, in which an instructed and right- 
ous people shall govern itself, using aristocracies of 
every style, and being ruled by none of them. In his 
amazement, like a man in an earthquake, he flutters about, 
protesting against everything, and proposing, as the only 
hope of the Nation, a return to the Public School So- 
ciety of New York of 1842 ; the ante-bellum order of 
affairs in the Atlantic Southern States, and the system 
of schooling for the people that was declared a delusion 
and a sham by Thomas Jefferson a hundred years ago. 
All these things are as dead as the corpse of Julius 
Caesar ; and about the poorest use that Mr. Grant and 
his disciples can make of their literary ability is to 
hover about the cemetery watching the opportunity to 
play the role of " resurrection-man " in the majestic 
drama of our new American life. 



THE SOCIAL SIDE OF IT. 173 



THE SOCIAL SIDE OF IT. 

A good and finely cultivated lady, one of the mild 
critics of the schools, relates her grievance somewhat in 
this fashion : " I was brought up in a Boston family and 
my father's house, through my early girlhood, was the 
resort of many people that have since become famous. 
My education was received partly from teachers at 
home and the best private schools. At eighteen, I con- 
cluded, with a young friend, to take the course in one 
of the State Normal Schools; and have always been 
glad I did so. But there I met a class of girls I had 
never before known ; graduates of the public schools of 
Boston. They were well up in a certain line of school 
studies, but so curiously uncultivated in manners, 
knowledge of the world, and the thousand indescribable 
acquirements that make an accomplished and effective 
young lady, that I was amazed at what I saw. From 
that time I have felt that the public school needed a 
great reform, — I dont exactly know what ; but some- 
thing that will send out girls better fitted for society, 
with broader views and a more general knowledge of 
human affairs." 

Our Atlantic Monthly takes up another branch of 
the same complaint, and asserts that the public 
schools develop a sort of public type of character 
and manners, and " train their pupils to meet an 
audience." A good many well-to-do ladies in society 
object to a certain lack of lady-like " tone" and gentle- 
ness in the average school-mistress, even when she is the 
complete product of the whole graded course, including 



174 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

the normal school. The old doctor in our native vil- 
lage struck a similar key when the new doctor brought 
the first copy of Shakespeare to town : " That Shakes- 
peare makes boys sassy, and ought to be put down." 

Now, the good lady aforesaid was only a little short 
in her logic, besides leaving out some important factors 
in her premise. Her training had been the most felici- 
tous possible. Her school was a cultivated home in a 
famous city in vital social relations with the most culti- 
vated families, visited in a familiar way by men and 
women whose names are now embalmed in American 
history. Of course, her general schooling was at first- 
hand. She lived in an atmosphere of broad ideas, 
striking events, and noble sentiments ; always taught to 
look beyond her own little sphere and include all 
classes of people, her country, and the progress of our 
many-sided modern civilization, in her thought and con- 
versation. At the normal school she met the able, for- 
cible, conscientious girl who is the type of nine-tenths of 
the best women, even in Boston, and the overwhelming 
majority in any American community. This girl prob- 
ably came up in a family moderately intelligent and 
thoroughly worthy of respect : but whose social sur- 
roundings included none of the specially cultivated or in 
any way remarkable people of the town. It is doubt- 
ful if one of these girls had ever spoken to a famous 
man, or even been in a room with a highly cultivated 
woman, with the exception of the school-room relation 
with her superior teachers. With all the substantial 
social virtues, she was greatly deficient in what is called 
"social training." Of course, the whole realm of gen- 
eral knowledge, the peculiar way of looking at tilings 
which was so familiar to her new associate, was to her 
like a far-off world. But what had the public school to 



THE SOCIAL SIDE OF IT. 175 

do with that ? It had given her the elements of a 
solid education, lifted her to a position where by her 
own efforts she would probably find herself in a 
place where, for the first time, she would enjoy those 
rare opportunities of cultivated society and the friend- 
ship of eminent people to which her companion was 
born. The schools had given her the best foundation 
for a broad, genial, and refined womanhood. No school 
could give her that social training and peculiar inti- 
mate knowledge of the upper strata of this world's af- 
fairs in which our friend found her deficient. But 
twenty years hence, when this girl finds herself the 
wife of a New York clergyman ; the mistress of a 
wheat-farm in Minnesota ; the maiden sister called to 
rear the family of a brother who is a banker in New 
Orleans ; her Boston school-training will be seen for 
what it is, — the very central element of the cultivation 
that makes her a leader in society, and it will distin- 
guish her from the other class of " young ladies" ; — who, 
with early social opportunities and a superficial educa- 
tion, find themselves, in middle life, the ornaments, but 
not the rulers of society ; because they fail at the very 
point where the thorough training of the superior pub- 
lic school comes in. 

Just so with the multitudes of public-school children 
who come swarming up from the vast realm of social 
life below the kind of people of which we have spoken. 
Half the children in the public schools of any city come 
from homes where the very words, " good society," too 
often " good morals " or " decent manners," have no 
meaning. If these little ones in five years are taught 
respectful manners, self-possession, the great art of 
standing before their superiors without base fear or 
cringing humility, can step to a school-platform and 



176 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

make a good appearance before their parents and friends, 
one would say here is a positive gain of valuable knowl- 
edge and handsome behavior, which will stand by them 
in their whole future, and probably go far toward in- 
suring their worthy success in life. 

In other words, a good education, such as can now 
be obtained by the humblest child in a good common 
school, is the bed-rock on which can be built up the 
noblest fabric of good culture, christian character, relia- 
ble citizenship, or artistic refinement ; while without 
such foundation, it will be found well nigh impossible 
to develop the best type of the American character in 
any body. And a great many of the extraordinary 
people of the time forget this, and censure the schools 
for not doing what the most famous university cannot 
achieve. We repeat, — No school can do the work of a 
cultivated home, a pure church, or a practical training 
in the actual affairs of life. But any good school can 
do that for any faithful pupil, without which, neither 
home, nor church, nor wealth, nor all the glory of this 
world can insure our boys against barbarism and keep 
our girls out of the limbo of frivolity. If these numer- 
ous distinguished critics will do their own duty by- 
young America, the schools will not be found wanting 
in their contribution to the new kingdom that is to 
come. 



BBOAD- GA UGE TEACHING. 177 



BROAD-GAUGE TEACHING. 

There are criticisms of the schools which are non- 
sense, and criticisms founded on stubborn sense. Men 
of affairs say that the ordinary high-school graduate 
is ignorant of common affairs. The cultivated peo- 
ple complain that even the normal-school girl knows 
nothing but her school books and her methods. And, 
noth withstanding the fact that the school teachers are 
probably the best educated class outside the three old 
professions, our polite society still insists that the whole 
common-school crowd is lacking in social refinement. It 
is very easy to flare up against these charges ; a good 
deal easier than to prove they are not " founded in fact." 
Here, as in other doubtful matters, it is better to go on 
to remove the cause of complaint than to protest against 
exaggeration. 

All such criticisms, with many others now afloat, 
touch upon one serious drawback to a good deal of the 
present instruction in all our schools. In the absence 
of a thoroughly developed professional class of a hun- 
dred thousand first rate school teachers, we are com- 
pelled to carry on our vast system of elementary instruc- 
tion by the help of a great body of young men and 
women who neither are, nor intend to become, educa- 
tional experts. To make the matter worse, we insist 
that this, the most responsible public service in America, 
shall be given for the average compensation of a skilled 
house-servant or a fair mechanic. Of course, even for 
this small pay we get much better work than we 
deserve. For teaching is not only respectable, but it 
1 



178 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

also appeals to the noblest principles ; and hundreds of 
splendid young men and women are serving the chil- 
dren, often the humblest in the land, far more for love 
than for money. Still it is true that, under these cir- 
cumstances, large numbers of our teachers know little 
except the books from which they hear lessons. The 
majority have no thorough acquaintance with the sub- 
ject of these text-books. 

Many who are well up in the subjects they teach are 
deficient, often strangely deficient, in reliable knowledge 
of the common affairs of life, and only a moderate por- 
tion of this hardworking hundred thousand have ever 
enjoyed those opportunities for social culture which 
place their graduates at the head of social affairs, and 
add so largely to the charm of mental and moral acquire- 
ments. It is useless to deny this fact, and the fact is a 
drawback to the value of our present school instruction 
in this country. It is no valid objection to our national 
idea of popular education, or to our present school 
system. It is not true concerning an increasing and 
important class of our superior teachers. It simply 
detracts from the value of a good deal of the instruction 
and influence proceeding from a numerous body of 
teachers in all sorts of American schools. 

The first reply to this charge is the old repartee of 
Dr. Johnson about the servant girls, " You can't have 
all the virtues for three and sixpence a week." Every- 
body endowed with common sense understands that 
cheap things are poor things. But, strange to say, this 
shrewdest of all peoples makes itself a cheap Jack in its 
educational affairs, and demands in the school-room a 
knowledge, wisdom, breadth of culture, and loftiness and 
refinement of character which is almost the exception 
in the established professions and the most eminent 



BROAD - GA UGE TEACHING. 179 

society in the Nation. If the people want thorough 
cultivation, broad general intelligence, and established 
character with fine manners in the school-room, why do 
they insist in bribing every immature and needy young 
man and woman who has recited through a few school- 
books, to assume the office of instruction ? And when 
they find a lady of rare gifts and graces in the place,, 
why is every rough and stingy tongue let loose against 
her till she is worried out of her place, by tinkering 
with her salary ? Why do wealthy cities of fifty thou- 
•sand people haggle over the few hundred dollars that 
will keep a tried schoolmaster or superintendent, and 
beat the bush, year after year, to get first.class work in 
the most critical points of their school system, for third- 
rate pay? Why does the highest salary of the most 
eminent teacher and supervisor of schools stop short at 
the point where numbers of young ministers, lawyers, 
doctors, and even salesmen begin, on the upward flight 
to a competence. 

The short way to deal with this criticism is to say 
plainly to the sovereign people : It is no merit of yours 
that the teaching in American schools is as good as now. 
If you demand high things in the school-children, call 
the highest class in the land to instruct them. You 
do not expect what we are talking about, — thorough cul- 
ture, broad information, established character, fine social 
tact, from young people at all ; from any save a select class 
after long experience and professional training. You 
refuse to accept the only conditions under which teach- 
ing can become true professional work. You fill the 
school-rooms with multitudes of worthy young people, 
who are kept there by their necessities, and then tell us 
the public schools are a failure, and the private schools 
are a sham. Fulfill the conditions, and you shall have 
instruction that will meet the highest demand. 



180 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

It cannot be too sharply impressed on our people that 
school work, in the modern sense, is the most difficult 
of all things done in the land. This, even when noth- 
ing but creditable scholarship is demanded as the result. 
But when to this we add the demand for a style of 
instruction that shall ultimate in good citizenship, we 
multiply the difficulty. The sober truth is, that the 
vast majority of our teachers are doing their level best 
now. There is no reasonable hope of better instruction 
while the people refuse to supply the conditions of a 
broader success. Improved methods have done all they 
can, until experts can be found to work the methods. 
Supervision is no panacea ; its outcome depends on the 
teachers who are supervised. It is even inhuman in the 
last degree to coax and bribe these multitudes of needy, 
inexperienced young people to assume the noblest of 
human professions, and then visit them with cultivated 
scorn and public indifference or wrath because of their 
failure to accomplish what never yet was well done ex- 
cept by people carefully trained, adequately supported, 
and held up to their lofty work by all the incentives 
that appeal to the finest souls. 

But the short way of dealing with things spiritual is 
not always quite satisfactory. There is another side to 
this matter, to which we shall call attention. 

In the foregoing we have endeavored to set forth a rem- 
edy for the acknowledged defect of narrowness and lack 
of general culture in much of our work in the school- 
room. We found one explanation of the difficulty in 
the low ideal and stingy practice of the people, who 
presist in calling to the most responsible work large 
numbers of persons unfitted by culture, maturity of 
character, and executive tact, for the care of children. 



BROAD GAUGE TEACHING. 181 

We insisted that the people receive a great deal more 
for their money than they have reason to expect, from 
the small sum they are willing to pay the average 
teacher. We recently visited a portion of New Eng- 
land, celebrated as the birthplace of half-a-dozen of the 
greatest American characters of the past half-century, 
and " noble women not a few." Yet these towns are 
actually paying, to-day, smaller wages for the teachers 
of their district schools than are demanded by ordinary 
servant-girls and young women who cut and make 
dresses in the suburban towns of Boston. We are glad 
to know that faithful servants and women, who live by 
the labor of their hands, are well paid. But as long as 
superior young women in New England are expected 
to teach school on starvation-wages, the people have no 
reason to expect that a broad-gauge educational train 
can be run on the narrow-gauge track laid by their own 
indifference and petty economy. 

But, of course, this " short answer " does not fully 
meet the case. As a matter of fact, even in the wealth- 
iest parts of the North, thousands of our finest young 
women are teaching school amid embarrassments of 
which the poor pay is not the greatest. And when we 
go South and learn the grievances of the teachers, men 
and women, our compassion for their lot is often lost in 
envy and admiration for the noble spectacle of self-sac- 
rificing toil that illumines so many school-rooms. In 
other words, the teacher's work, in the last analysis, is 
not a job but a ministry often more attractive to the 
loftiest minds for the trials and drawbacks that make it 
disgusting to a sordid and self-indulgent soul. Hence 
the school-rooms of the nation are really filled with a 
higher class of teachers than we should expect, consid- 
ering the discouragements of the profession. Thou- 



182 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

sands on thousands of admirable people go into the 
school-house on Monday morning inspired by an eleva- 
tion of purpose, a tenderness of affection, and a heroic 
self-sacrifice that might be the model for the clergy 
who mount the pulpit on Sunday. So this problem of 
broad-gauge teaching is not to be solved alone by an 
increase of material facilities. The improved school- 
house with its model furniture, the latest edition of 
text-books, shining apparatus, and generous salary 
may all be presented, and yet the verdict "One thing 
thou lackest," may fully explain the want of breadth, 
practical adaptation, and common sense in the instruc- 
tion given to the children. 

That one thing, without which the most cultivated 
teaching will run to narrowness, pedantry, and imprac- 
ticability, is the childlike spirit of consecrated love, 
whereby the girl-teacher finds her way to the heart of 
the child ; the great professor lays his hand on the 
will of the freakish sophomore, and the wise parent 
brings up a family " in the nurture and admonition of 
the Lord." The chief obstacle to good teaching is moral 
unfitness. Where one teacher fails from lack of knowl- 
edge and technical training, a hundred fall through 
pride, laziness, lack of self-control, dryness of affection, 
and languid interest in their scholars. It is not diffi- 
cult for a " smart " man or woman to get a school in 
fair running order and obtain the average result of 
school-book information, even to extemporize a little 
daily spurt of fireworks in the ten-minute object-lesson re- 
quired in the course of study. But whether the teacher 
shall break through this shell of formal instruction and 
drive at the souls of the children, waking up a commo- 
tion, making the blind to see, the deaf hear, the lame 
walk, and thrilling the dullest spirit with a gospel of 



BROAD-GAUGE TEACHING. 183 

" truth in the inward parts," depends entirely on the 
morale of the teacher. If he is a pedant, a self-seeker, a 
shirk, a little man occupied in flying a splendid kite of 
" culture " ; if she is a heartless, godless, ambitious 
girl, or even the regulation " young lady teacher " with 
an eye on something to which her school is but the lad- 
der, that work will not get done. But if a teacher is 
in charge who cannot sleep o'nights at the thought of 
how stupid these children are, spite of all they know, 
every morning will witness a " reconnaisance in force," 
and every week a grand assault upon this concentrated 
mass of dullness, indifference, and ugliness that is the 
citadal of the enemy's power. 

There are few teachers now in our schools who do 
not know enough about common things to interest their 
pupils in various matters of vital interest in common 
life. Almost every teacher is able to illustrate every 
lesson from her own reading, observation, and expe- 
rience. And, certainly, the most ordinary teacher may 
learn, every week, enough from her pupils to become 
the most vigorous student in the school. Indeed, no- 
where are found such incentives to genuine study, hard 
thinking, accurate observation, self-discipline, and high 
training in manners, morals, and executive force as in 
the position of teacher. If the men and women now em- 
ployed by the people would really use these advantages 
in behalf of the children as they might, our school- 
keeping would spring to life, like the dead man raised 
from the bier by the mighty power of incarnate love. 

But whether this will be done depends on nobody 
but the teachers. They can exhaust themselves by de- 
ploring the hardships of their lot, pitying themselves 
and protesting against the people who thus oppress 
them. We shall all say, — " Yes, your plea is true ; but 



184 TALES WITH TEACHERS. 

what would have become of this world if they who have 
been called to minister in the upper realm of life had 
spent their strength in this way ? " Because a few he- 
roic souls, in every difficult strait in the past, have put 
these things behind them and wrought for love's sake, 
the great dull mass of mankind has been somewhat 
awakened, and you occupy the vantage-ground of to-day. 
The moment the liberal professions take the attitude of 
the man ofjbusiness ; face the people and demand better 
pay, broader privileges, higher rank; the people instinct- 
ively declare them no longer liberal and despise the 
clergyman, the teacher, the physician, the author, while 
they acknowledge the force of their claim. For, really, 
the one element in life that saves mankind from utter 
unbelief and despair, and keeps alive a mighty hope 
that, after all, this is God's world, is the self-sacrificing 
labors of the few faithful who are so thankful they can 
work for men in the highest way, that they almost for- 
get how meanly the world recieves them. So the true 
teacher may " thank God and take courage " ; for this 
very element of sacrifice and hardship is the " hiding- 
place of his power "; the sole condition of his deepest 
influence over children, parents, and the great cause of 
a true education. 

The " conclusion of the whole matter " is, that while 
the people have no excuse for that narrow economy 
which drives from the school-rooms the teachers who 
could easily inaugurate a broader and loftier style of 
instruction; yet, the teachers already on the ground 
have far less excuse for their great defect of moral 
force which is the key to so much inefficient work with 
the children. 



GRADE TOUR SCIIOOL. 185 



GRADE YOUR SCHOOL. 

The complaint is sometimes made that our educa- 
tional journals are constructed exclusively for graded 
schools, and are of little service to the great mass of 
country teachers, whose work lies amid the distractions 
of a district school ranging from ten to thirty pupils. 
The complaint opens up the whole subject of school 
grading, and points to a wide-spread delusion concern- 
ing school work. It is assumed, even by people of 
great scholastic reputation, that the ideal school is a 
private tutorship where a celebrated teacher brings all 
his resources to bear on one child ; that, next to this, a 
little select private school is beet, because the individu- 
ality of each pupil can thus be preserved ; and in pub- 
lic schools the best work should be done in the small 
country district. According to this estimate, Satan 
enters the paradise of individualism with the first at- 
tempt at grading, while the metropolitan system is only 
another name for a superficial drill of children in brig- 
ades, resulting in sham and cram and the ultimate sup- 
pression of all proper individuality. 

Now this, like many another beautiful theory, runs 
against the everlasting laws and most obvious facts of 
life. The individuality of the humblest human being 
is a matter which chiefly concerns the Creator. No 
teacher can do much to foster it, and no man is strong 
enough to suppress it. What is called " developing 
the individuality " in little squads of children, in small 
schools, is chiefly the attempt of an obstinate pedagogue 
to force his own type of character and favorite notions 



186 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

upon his pupils. The result is either an arrested 
development of the child's proper individuality or a bit- 
ter duel between the two, all the more intense because 
fought out behind the mask of school proprieties. If 
the teacher will give the pupil mental and spiritual 
sea-room, deal with him in the spirit of love, reverence 
for truth, and earnest desire to assist him in the best 
use of his own powers, he can safely leave the develop- 
ment of individuality to the providential school of life. 
And in this work the influence of children upon each 
other is often far more important than any work of the 
teacher. Indeed, the final proof of the true teacher is 
the ability to make a proper classification of his pupils, 
so that each may exert the most healthful influence 
upon all, and the whole school be brought in as a corps 
of assistants in the training of every child. God's 
method of developing true individuality is not to invite 
a strong man to "sit down " on a little child, or an en- 
thusiastic school-mistress to "overlay" the baby intel- 
lect of a five-year-old boy. It is illustrated when a 
wise, reverent, skillful teacher disposes a crowd of chil- 
dren in classes and grades so that the entire spiritual 
power of a large school is brought to bear as an elevator 
for every member. This is the reason that all educa- 
tional journals that deserve the name are adjusted for 
graded schools. A journal full of minute directions for 
puttering over a dozen children, in as many separate 
classes, would resemble a treatise on military tactics 
which treated chiefly of the duty of sentinels, scouts, 
and bummers, and left the movements of the grand 
army untouched. The thing for the country school- 
mistress to do is to grade her school. If she does not 
understand what that means, let her find out by sub- 
scribing for and reading a first-class educational journal, 



GRADE YOUR SCHOOL. 187 

reinforced by a good treatise on school-keeping and the 
best observation and thought of which she is capable. 
If nothing comes of this, let her say " yes " to the first 
respectable offer to do anything, so it remove her from 
the school-room and give the children a chance to be 
taught in the only effective way. 



188 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



HARD-PAN. 

The educational muddle, just now, is not due to a 
false organization of educational forces, or a top-heavy 
and impracticable system, as the critics are in the habit 
of saying. It comes out in the administration of the 
system. In every nook and corner of this administra- 
tion, with our characteristic national haste and super- 
ficiality, we are bringing ourselves into a vicious con- 
tentment with poor work. The country is full of fine- 
young men and women who, with patient study and 
thorough training, could become the most effective 
teachers of children in the world. But how many of 
them are willing to "endure unto the end," waiting till 
they are fit to be entrusted with that most sacred re- 
sponsibility, the charge of a school. Our best methods 
of instruction are the admiration of every parent and 
scholar competent to form an opinion. But how few, 
even of the graduates of the Normal School, are willing 
to pray and toil for that insight into human nature and 
that childlike spirit without which the finest method is 
the most dismal sham ! Sitting day after day in the 
school-rooms, in our journeyings up and down the land, 
the " whole head becomes sick and the whole heart 
faint" with the thought, — " How little of this work 
really touches bottom anywhere ! n how much of it is 
only raising a dust on the surface of the pupil's mind ! 
and how rare a thing it is that the foundation-stones of 
this temple of knowledge rest upon the hard-pan ! n 
The man who, in this month of March, should build a 
house on the frozen mud of Illinois or the ice of a 



HARD-PAN. 189 

Northern lake, would expect that wreck and ruin would 
follow an April thaw. But we, schoolmen and teach- 
ers, go on, year after year, building in the shallow sur- 
faces of the child's nature, not realizing that the first 
great upheaval of passion or ambition or selfish interest, 
a few years later, will dispose of our fine fabric 
and leave our boasted culture a medley of brilliant 
fragments. 

As long as the critics ply the rod in this direction, 
let us thank them for their fidelity, and repent our- 
selves of everything in our school work that does not 
go down to a foundation in human nature that cannot 
be washed away. The best teachers need perpetual 
warning to hold them up to the highest demands of 
their own reason and conscience. The majority of par- 
ents do not expect, and the mass of children resist 
thoroughly, honest dealing in school. They expect the 
finest results of culture without the thorough work 
which lays the foundation of every real temple of 
knowledge. They are impatient of the wise and faith- 
ful instructor who will not be coaxed or driven a hair's 
breadth beyond the real capacity of the child. But 
just here the teacher must stand fast or all is lost. 
The moment this point is yielded the Evil One comes 
in, and shiftlessness, half-knowledge, bungling, and in- 
efficient education are only a question of time. Every 
true worker in the realm of mind must bear the cross. 
And the teacher's cross so often comes in the tempta- 
tion to yield to the demands of maternal fondness and 
permit the pupil to run along the surfaces of things 
with no firm foothold on the solid earth ! The test of 
the real teacher is the ability to shoulder this cross, to 
insist on reality, on thoroughness, on genuine awaken- 
ing and training of the mind, at all hazards. And the 



190 TALKS WITH TEACLTERS. 

teacher who can do this is sure of the future ; sure of a 
harvest more bountiful as the years go on in the life of 
every school child that has responded to his powerful 
mastership. The Kingdom of God will begin to come 
in the school-room when the teachers are ready to obey 
the Word, — " When they persecute you in one city, flee 
into another." The smallest group of teachers, in any 
community, resolutely standing on the hard-pan, al- 
ways ready to go if the people will not bear a true ad- 
ministration of their office, will finally wake up a revi- 
val in education and bring in a new day of hope for the 
children. 

In our more cultivated communities the teachers are 
always in danger of being deceived by a brightness and 
general nimbleness of mind that the children gain from 
their contact with a brilliant and rapid society. We 
have been in many a school room where the real lesson 
of the hour was lost amid the glitter and sparkle of a 
class of bright misses who could almost " deceive the 
very elect" with the fancy that they knew everything 
when they had no real knowledge of the topic in hand. 
What a cruelty it is to send out this great crowd of 
smart and saucy youth with the impression that all 
things in life can be won by a brilliant charge of bay- 
onets, only to dash themselves against the awful ada- 
mant of God's eternal truth that " knows no variable- 
ness nor shadow of turning" ! Our faithful teachers of 
the colored people in the great schools of the South are 
in perpetual danger of being washed off their founda- 
tions by a flood of sentiment, a blind eagerness, a pas- 
sional surge, or any one of a dozen interesting traits of 
character in the freedman, which blinds the eyes of his 
teacher and preacher to his imperative need of accurate 
knowledge, right habits of thinking, and a mental 



HARD-PAN. 191 

training that will liberate him from the peril of his 
own tropical imagination and unbridled motive-power. 
Nothing will stand in our new structure of Southern 
education that is not founded on the rock. And noth- 
ing will endure anywhere, however magnificent its 
name or seductive its promise, that does not make the 
eternal realities of physical and spiritual nature its 
point of departure, and build on the foundation that can- 
not be moved. 



192 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 



CHRISTMAS. 

Herewith goes a Christmas greeting from the sanc- 
tum to all teachers of schools ; all school-boys and 
school-girls ; all harrassed school committeemen and 
women j all parents of children, large and small ; all 
experts of the new education, including fogies of the 
old education, good-natured or otherwise. We throw 
The Journal upon the table with other Christmas 
gifts, hoping to be welcomed as not the least of the 
friends who make up the catalogue when the books 
of affection are posted to the tune of the Christmas 
chimes. 

Of all festivals that relieve our sorely-jaded Ameri- 
can life, the Christmas holiday is the most characteris- 
tic of the new time and the new republic. We do not 
celebrate the old English or the new German Christ- 
mas. But, as in all things else, we are blending the 
solid comfort and substantial joy of old England and 
the freakish imagery and the boisterous delight of the 
German-land, with features purely American, in making 
up the program for the holiday season that begins with 
Christmas eve and ends with New Year's night. Al- 
ready the Yankee who fought off Christmas as the 
crowning heresy for two hundred years, has fallen in, 
and goes for Christmas festivities in the intense, swift 
way with which he hunts every thing desirable. Now 
Boston is already an unmitigated jam with the rush after 
Christmas. The great West roars with joy like one of 
its great prairie storms. The Knickerbocker spreads 



CHRISTMAS. 193 

himself through a whole week of miscellaneous frolic, 
intermingled with the merry jangle of great church 
hells. The new South looks into the eyes of the chil- 
dren, forgets the troubled past, and glimpses the vision 
of the mighty future in her imperial domain. All the 
best things in the celebration of Christmas in the old 
world appear in new form, with novel combinations in 
some realm of our blessed America. 

Christmas is the real children's holiday of the year. 
The youngsters prize their school-vacation far more for 
quality than quantity. The long summer weeks be- 
come, at last, a heaviness ; while the short, intense va- 
cation of the Christmas holidays crowds a year's delight 
into a week of uproarious fun. There is just the key- 
note to this holiday that permits every beautiful varia- 
tion, from grave to gay, in the life of the little folk. 
One of our great newspapers tells us the American 
Christmas is already a secular festival. But secular ifc 
certainly is not in the narrow, materialistic sense of the 
word. Rather is it especially religious in its consecra- 
tion of all the general, gladsome, even grotesque ele- 
ments, that make up the life of the disciple of the 
" new commandment " of love. It is an incalculable 
gain to the cause of piety, good morals, and true educa- 
tion, that the young can, for one week in the year, be 
relieved from the solemnity and severity too often re- 
garded their indispensable companions, and shown 
again the mighty meaning of those exhortations to 
" rejoice in the Lord in the beauty of holiness ; " to 
" praise the Lord with gladness ; " and to follow wis- 
dom as the lovliest prize of life. 

The true way to rescue the beautiful side of life 
from its curse, is to show that the most intense enjoy- 
ment and the most delicious fun are the handmaids of 



194 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

that heavenly trinity, — truth, beauty, and love, — that 
abides in the kingdom of heaven. 

'But Christmas is not alone a season of merry-mak- 
ing. All its delights go forth from the manger in 
Bethlehem, and with every hour of its celebration the 
heart turns with thoughtful, serious contemplation to 
the awful mystery that hovers over the new-born son 
of God and man. And to no one does this serious and 
solemn reflection come with more impressive force than 
to the teacher in the people's school. Whatever the 
creed or form of faith, every wise and true-hearted in- 
structor of children recognizes in the Great Teacher 
the ideal of his own lofty work ; the safe guide in the 
way of teaching, and the spirit that should pervade the 
school. We speak of the "New Education" as if mod- 
ern science had created some novel method of training 
the mind and moulding the character of youth. - But 
all our improved methods of instruction in home, church, 
and school are but a faint approach to the inimitable 
method of Him who went about Palestine waking up 
the minds, opening the eyes, and training the mental life 
of the common people. They " heard him gladly," just 
as the most uncultured crowd in America to-day lis- 
tens with breathless delight when the true teacher 
comes to them in the divine way of sincerity, simplicity, 
and fidelity to the common facts of their life. The new 
discipline in the schoolhouse, the prison, and the family is 
only our feeble attempt to work out the law of love, 
the Lord's prayer, and the golden rule. Our boasted 
«cience is only the waking up to the stupendous 
truth proclaimed by the master through his wondrous 
works and mystic words, — the truth that the soul 
is the sovereign of nature, and as the centuries roll 
on, is destined to unlock the mysteries, compre- 



CHRISTMAS. 195 

liend the laws and wield the forces of the material 
world. That expert of the New Education who under- 
takes to cut away his little system from its vital con- 
nection with the spirit and the methods of the Divine 
Teacher of the modern world, is like the man who 
should pass his sharp knife between the tender blades 
of the growing grain and their roots under ground, and 
then demand the teeming harvest that rolls across the 
prairie in billows of gold. 

And here comes in the great, good hope of every 
teacher that really loves his work and does it in the 
best way, waiting on Providence. To the dull eye of 
worldliness, what sight more unpromising than the child 
Jesus in the manger, with a price already on his head ? 
To the proud pedantry of selfish culture what spectacle 
less inspiring than the ignorant crowd lying upon the 
slopes while the new Teacher held forth in the Sermon 
on the Mount ? What school, what community of any 
race, class, or tribe, more capricious, unmanageable, un- 
teachable than the multitudes that followed the man of 
Nazareth, one day proclaiming him the king, another 
day crying: "Let him be crucified"? Surely, if any- 
body ever had reason to think meanly, in a hopeless 
way, of human nature, it was that little band of pupil- 
teachers left behind when the Master had gone away 
and the comforter had not yet come. But when, in 
some moment of quiet reflection, amid the holiday 
tumult, the faithful teacher looks out upon the town in 
which she lives, with its churches, its free education for 
all, its blended liberty and order, its Christian charities 
and social courtesies, its happy homes, even in their dark- 
est trials cheered by light from heaven, — how can she des- 
pair of her own work when so much has already been 
achieved ? So let the very pleasures and frolics of the 



196 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

Christmas holiday bear this lesson to all whose vocation 
is with the children, — that with every little child is 
born a mighty hope for mankind ; and that of all 
things done in this world nothing so honors our human- 
ity and prophesies our immortality, as wise, patient, con- 
secrated service among the little ones in the spirit of 
Him who took little children in his arms and blessed 
them, saying, " Of such is the kingdom of heaven.'' 



MECHANISM VS. MIND. 197 



MECHANISM VS. MIND. 

There are two sorts of vigorous school-teachers whose 
work ultimates itself in widely different results. 

The one is, to some extent, the outcome of our new 
and severe system of grading in large city schools. 
Where the material of these schools will permit, the 
system often becomes little less than a prodigious 
machine, into one end of which the infant of five years 
disappears, to emerge, at twenty, a full-fledged graduate 
in school lore. Now there is no absolute necessity that 
a good graded school should be a foe to a proper devel- 
opment of the pupil. There is a good deal of non- 
sense among amateur schoolmen, in regard to the 
development of individuality through school life. In- 
dividuality is the stamp of God on body and soul, and 
can neither be greatly increased nor diminished by any 
meddling of man. The one essential work of the 
sanitarian is to minister to the general health of the 
body. A good beefsteak, pure air, sunshine, water, 
and exercise turn out blue eyes and auburn hair, or black 
eyes in the brunette, according to the mysterious inten- 
tion of Him who abhors monotony and never repeats 
Himself in the least of His creations. In like manner, 
a good method of general mental training, with whole- 
some moral and industrial discipline, will turn out 
numberless varieties of scholarly character, while the 
conceited pedagogue who attempts to fumble with this 
miracle of individuality will succeed only in becoming 
a temporary tyrant and a nuisance in the school-room. 



198 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

The evil that comes from a mechanical abuse of the 
graded system is not so much the neglect to develop 
the individuality, as the utter failure to move the 
springs of that common culture which is the first neces- 
sity of real education. 

An over-zealous teacher can easily become infatuated 
with the superficial working of a thoroughly graded 
school. There are always a few bright children in 
every school-room who eagerly take to well-ordered 
methods of instruction, kindle their own fire as they 
go, and, unless held well in hand, monopolize the real 
work of the class. The enthusiastic teacher is captured 
by their readiness, whirled onward by their vivacity, 
and, spite of himself, often comes to look on them as 
his entire brigade. They, in turn, inspire the dull and 
dependent majority with a superficial habit of imitation 
and readiness to catch correct answers, so that the very 
elect are often misled. The result is seen in thousands 
of schools, where the mechanical habit of discipline and 
instruction is carried to a marvelous point. Before 
such a class we stand, as in the presence of some won- 
der-working piece of mechanism, afraid even to think 
there may be an illusion under this stupendous sho"w of 
mental activity, yet conscious that no healthy child can 
be so " smart" as every child appears to be. The misery 
of it all is, that no pupil in the room has really been 
trained or taught in any deep and vital ivay. The 
whole movement is mechanical ; transmitted from the 
intense vigor of the teacher, through the more energetic 
pupils, to the entire crowd. And it resembles real 
teaching much as the tremendous buzz, awakened by 
a boy stirring up a bee-hive with a long pole, could 
be likened to the natural journeying of the bees, them- 



MECHANISM VS. MIND. 199 

selves, from flower to flower, to gather honey for a win- 
ter's store. 

The true teacher is no enemy to a truly graded 
school. He believes in orderly arrangement, a tit cur- 
riculum, good methods of instruction, and discipline. 
But he uses all these as aids to the real work of stir- 
ring the mind, awakening true impulses, and developing 
native activities. He does not object to the leadership 
of his class by the superior few ; for every school-room 
is led by its leading class, and to teach without such 
aid would be useless. His real aim is the common 
personality of every child. He seeks to arouse the 
love of truth, the thirst for knowledge and to train the 
working-powers common to all. In doing this, in a 
vital way, he does not produce a slavish uniformity. 
One boy, on being awakened to the love of knowledge 
and fitly trained, becomes a superior linguist, another 
a lover of science, a third a mathematician. James 
remains James, and Mary is not changed to Jane or 
Joe, because all receive the common training that un- 
derlies a true individuality in every child of man. In 
this school the motive-power is not a force from with- 
out, but an inspiration from within. The deep earnest- 
and genuine sympathy of the teacher kindles, first, the 
more generous and susceptible, and creates an irresist- 
ible public opinion on the side of thorough study and 
good conduct. Right examples and real methods of 
study are as contagious, in their own way, as mechan- 
ism in its shallow sphere. So this teacher, because he 
is a deeper and broader man, appealing to the nobler 
side of youth, carries the keys that unlock the eager 
mind, the over-full heart, and the abounding latent 
energy of the child. His work cannot be tested on 



200 TALKS WITH TEACHERS. 

examination day, or shown off in a display of school- 
room fireworks for the amazement of a wondering 
crowd of doting mamas and bewildered papas. But 
the most stupid urchin goes out from him somewhat 
touched with the glory and significance of life ; and to 
many a pupil his ministry in the school-room has been 
an apostleship of the Almighty God, proclaiming anew 
the everlasting gospel of truth and beauty and love. 



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